Judging and Casting the First Stone

This post has to do with judging, casting the first stone, and taking ourselves too seriously. The scriptures I am relating to are John 8: 1-11 and Matthew 7: 1-5.

In John 8: 1-11, Jesus was teaching in the temple and the scribes and Pharisees brought him a woman who had committed adultery. They mentioned that the punishment for adultery was stoning but they wanted Jesus to tell them what to do. Jesus paused. Then they continued to bug him about it, so he stood up and said, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." He again stooped down and paused.

Was he referring to himself as the one without sin and that he should be the one to cast the stone, and was his pause and writing in the dirt his answer that he would not cast a stone at the woman? And why did he pause twice, what was he thinking? What would Jesus do if he did what the scribes and the Pharisees wanted him to?

Matthew 7: 1-5 talks of judging and that we need to first examine our faults and take care of them before we can help someone else get rid of their faults.

As a school administrator I have experienced many instances where someone (a parent, teacher, or student) is pointing a finger at someone else. It seems like every day I would have to listen to others complain about other people or place the blame on others. The person complaining does not always want something done about the 'problem', I guess they just want to be heard.

While I am listening to the complaint, I am thinking of all the faults that the person sitting in front of me has and I have to 'bite my tongue' to keep from pointing out their faults. It is like seeing a list of their faults appear in front of my eyes.

One of the reasons that I mostly just listen and pause a lot while I am being yelled at or verbally abused or just plain being talked to about someone else and 'Their' problems that 'They' have caused everyone else to experience (especially the person sitting in front of me, or so they think), is that I am also seeing my own faults and a list appears before my eyes.

Don't get me wrong, I am not always a perfect listener and I have been known on several occasions to lash out with a complaint or two. I have on occasion been so frustrated at listening to the complainer that I have lashed out at them and started reading from the list of their faults that I am seeing before my eyes.

When someone is complaining, I want them to visualize a list of their own faults. I hope that maybe they will realize that their complaint is not going to solve anything and that they need to clean up their own act before they can help someone else clean up theirs.

Usually the person complaining is guilty of the same fault that they are complaining about. Just one silly example: One of the complaints that I have heard the most is that other teachers let their class be too loud in the hallways and just generally everywhere. When a teacher is standing in front of me making the complaint, though, what I am seeing is the list of times that she has let her own class become too loud and in the wrong locations. And being a teacher, I also remember all of the times that I let my guard down and my class was too disruptive and loud!

I wonder if Jesus, when he paused to write in the dirt, was seeing all of the faults of the woman's accusers and was hoping that they would see them, too.

Sometimes we take ourselves too seriously and think that what we are saying or doing is just right for the audience that we have in front of us, when they are not listening to us at all or what they are hearing is not exactly what we are saying.

An example: I remember listening to a coach describe the motivational talk that he had just delivered to his team after practice. I decided to quiz the players to see what they thought of the speech their coach had just so eloquently given them. I talked to two or three and none of them could tell me what the coach talked about. They had not concentrated on him at all.

Another example: I once read a story about a baseball team that had just finished a fine season but had come up short in their final contest. The loss had put an end to a season that their parents and coach thought would end with a championship. After the game there was the usual end of game talk and parents gathering around to rehash the game and season for a while. The rehashing for the parents continued that evening and for many occasions after that. The writer of the article, however, noticed that the ball players did not go on and on with the rehashing of their final game. He saw many of the players already shooting hoops at the local playground within minutes after the game. They were ready to go on with their lives and did not take the loss as seriously as their parents.

Another example: As a basketball coach I had a habit of giving my players bubble gum to chew at the games. I, too, had delivered many a glorious half time talk. One game I had given the girls some Bazooka bubble gum at half time. I delivered my half time talk thinking that I had motivated the girls to give a super effort in the second half. What I hadn't realized was that all of the girls were preoccupied during my talk with reading the comics that came with the gum. The head coach pointed this out to me during the second half by showing me that the players on the bench were more focused on reading their comics than watching the game.

We sometimes get so concerned that our opinion and judgment should be known, that we can not see that it is probably not that important.

And before we point out faults in others, we should examine our own faults.