Love is the End
When I was in middle-school, I was on a YMCA basketball team. We had a game one Sunday, and towards the end of the game I took a hard fall and twisted my knee kind of awkwardly. I was able to get up and keep on playing, but the knee was starting to hurt afterwards. I woke up the next morning and couldn’t move my knee at all. It had locked in place and any bending action at all meant instantaneous, excruciating pain. I think now that I had done something to the cartilage. Anyways, at that point, a normal person would have let someone know and went to see a doctor as soon as possible.
Not me.
I hobbled down the hallway to my parents’ bedroom and stuck my head in their doorway. “I’ve got the flu,” I mumbled, “I can’t go to school today.” I spent the rest of the day mostly in my room with my bum knee, which as the day went on gradually became a little easier to move. By the next day, I was moving mostly normally, although the knee wasn’t totally better for a couple of weeks.
My parents never knew. Not because I didn’t love them and trust them, but because I didn’t know how to tell them.
So that’s me. And though even then I knew it was stupid, that it didn’t make sense, there’s still a part of that young kid in me today, who doesn’t know how to get out the words. It was easier to suffer in silence than to open up about a problem in my life, and there’s still a part of me that finds it impossibly hard, sometimes, to be vulnerable with other people.
So there is fear. But where there is fear there is also the opportunity for trust.
Because ministry requires that we dare to be vulnerable.
In my darker moments, this seems the bitterest of ironies to me. To work in a job that is all about relating to people, sharing your heart, that is about incarnational, life-on-life contact, when those are the very things I often struggle with—it is so very easy to slip, to start comparing, to think that I need to be better at that, or be more like them, or otherwise be different than who I am.
And yet, these struggles have been a continual reminder of my need to say with Paul, “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness…for when I am weak, then I am strong.”[1]
Grace in weakness. Strength in weakness. These are ways that God has spoken into my life, again and again. Because being confronted with my weakness puts me face to face with how much I really trust God. If I could do it all on my own, I would happily go on my way, professing my strong faith, when really that faith would be nothing but trust in myself. Slamming into my weaknesses forces me to slam into God. Forces me to start to learn what trust really means.
And I’ve found that the more I fall in love with Jesus, the more compelling his love becomes, the more I am able to show my face and uncover myself in front of others. Because if I can hear his voice saying, “My child,” suddenly nothing else seems to matter.
We see an amazing image of this in the woman accused of adultery, standing alone in front of a crowd, accused, ashamed, condemned.
At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
This is one of my absolute favorite gospel stories. Your Bible probably has a note saying that the earliest manuscripts didn’t include this passage, but I always like to think that the people who had been with Jesus were all sitting around swapping stories one day, and this one got shared, and they were all like, “we’ve got to include that”.
The Pharisees were always looking for ways to discredit Jesus, to trap him, to trip him up. And they think they’ve got him this time. Jesus is teaching in the temple courts. He has, as usual, drawn quite the crowd of people, which is probably why the Pharisees chose this setting to lay their trap.
They bring in this woman. The Bible says that she had been caught in the act of adultery. They drag her before Jesus, make her stand there, alone, in front of the crowd. And then they ask Jesus a question. In front of the crowd they announce this woman’s sins, and then ask Jesus what should be done to her.
To the Pharisees, this woman is nothing. She’s something to be used; an object lesson to prove that they’re right and Jesus is wrong.
Her life has just been destroyed, and she’s standing there, broken. I can only imagine what she must have been feeling. The shame. The rage. The hopelessness. Probably some self loathing. Bitterness.
And so she’s standing there. Waiting for further condemnation. Judgment.
Except Jesus doesn’t follow the script.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
“No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”[2]
Jesus didn’t have time to plan a Bible study or a sermon to preach to this women. This didn’t happen in a controlled setting where he had an awesome scheduled out agenda. He was thrown into this situation, and in that moment, had to make the decision of how he was going to respond.
And the Pharisees think they have him. Because there is no right answer. Jewish law says stone the woman. Roman law forbids capital punishment.
You are going to face situations where there is no right answer. Where there are not even any good answers. Where you’re going, “This was not covered in Sunday School or church or Bible Study.”
But Jesus somehow is able to turn the situation around until, at the end, it’s just this woman and Jesus. They’re the only ones left. She was expecting condemnation—she found grace. She deserved judgment—she found Jesus.
In the end, it’s just her and Jesus. In the end, there’s no one left to accuse her.
We can dare to be vulnerable when we know how much we are loved.
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Written and shared by Kardia.
[1] 2 Corinthians 11:30, 12:10
[2] John 8:1-11