After the Blessing

Glorious mud, new life, and contentment

Ezekiel: "I will take your stony hearts from your bodies and give you natural hearts"

If we recognize the hand of God at work in our lives it is unnatural to have a stony heart. If we are aware of the life and love that flow from the Author of Life and the one who is love, how can we be "stony hearted?" But people do, nevertheless, become stony hearted. I wonder why that is so common? Is your heart "stony"? There is no higher calling for us than to glorify God, and there no way more pure to do that than to truly love with our hearts.

Today's gospel has the story of the woman caught in adultery that the crowd drags before Jesus and asks if she should be stoned under Moses' law. The stony-hearted crowd was standing around, ready to kill, but they had made Jesus her judge. Instead, he frustrates their effort by asking them to first judge themselves, saying "let the one without sin cast the first stone". Imagine the tension in the crowd as they waited for somebody else to make the first pitch, and the pressures as more and more turned away in admission of their guilt. Jesus does not condone adultery, which is clearly sin. But he does give this guilty woman a chance for salvation, telling her "go and sin no more". He separates the sin from the sinner, who he is about to suffer and die for.

This passage reminds me of the excerpt from Matthew where Jesus is talking about divorce. There he says Moses allowed divorce because the people were "stiff-necked", adding that it was not so from the beginning. With the New Testament comes the higher standards Jesus sets for all the commandments, without allowing for natural human frailty, but adding the power of the Messiah's saving grace.

Remember this story the next time you are ready to chunk a rock at someone who has behaved badly.