Afterlives, Chapter 3

For Michelle

Have you ever built a sandcastle? If so, hold that thought. I’ll come back to it later.

Here’s the afterlife story I’ll focus on from John 8:

As he (Jesus) was speaking, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd.

“Teacher,” they said to Jesus, “this woman was caught in the act of adultery.  The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?”

They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger.  They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust.

When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman.  Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, “Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?”

 “No, Lord,” she said.

And Jesus said, “Neither do I. Go and sin no more.”

I can’t imagine what that woman’s past was like. Maybe she had been desperately trying for a long time to find love in all the wrong places or, in this case, maybe she was set up— a pawn in a scheme to discredit Jesus. But He didn’t seem to care about her reasons for sinning. And He neither pardoned her, nor condemned her. He forgave her. She wasn’t innocent of the charges but was caught in the very act of a punishable sin. She had no defense. Still He forgave her.

         We would like to believe that this woman’s afterlife was radically changed following this encounter, and yet we can’t be sure. The scripture doesn’t say. Jesus just said, “go and sin no more,” much like the woman at the well, and we can hope that this woman’s life was changed forever.

But I don’t want to focus on her right now, but on those who witnessed this event. This is the only passage where Jesus is said to write. Nothing is said about what He wrote even though there is much conjecture about it.

However, the image of Jesus writing in the sand could have been the names of those in the crowd that He knew were guilty of a similar sin and that is why the woman’s accusers walked away. Let’s go with that theory. What happened to those men?

Back to the sandcastle analogy. What happens to every castle built on the sand? It is washed away as if it never happened. Erased forever. Could this be why He wrote in the sand—twice? He didn’t write on parchment or carved this into a piece of wood or into a stone. It was sand.  Could this be a metaphor for us? When God forgives us (“go and sin no more”) our transgressions are washed away like the sand. I want to believe that those who felt convicted that day went away with the knowledge that’s what happens when we’re forgiven for our sinful lives.

“Our sins are washed away, and we are made clean…” (Hebrews 10:10)