The Allure of Being Right

It wasn’t a real question.

“The law of Moses says we should stone her. What do you say?” the Pharisees asked Jesus as they brought the adulterous woman before him. But they weren’t really asking. They didn’t care what Jesus’ answer was. They didn’t ask his opinion because they wanted to know. They asked because they wanted to use his words against him.

Righteousness, truth — that wasn’t the goal. The goal was being right.

And in the middle of the whole scene, dragged before Jesus, used as a literal prop in this staged drama, is a woman. A real flesh-and-blood woman.

I find myself wanting to know more about her. She had been “caught in the act,” they claimed, but I wonder what that even means. With whom was this act committed, and what were the reasons for her participation in it? Was she coerced? Was she scared? Was she confused? Was it really a cut-and-dry, black-and-white situation of adultery, of lust, of making the wrong decision?

We will never know the answers to these questions, and it doesn’t matter — it’s not our business. God knows the answers. God knows the truth of the matter: what she did, what she chose, what she felt. Because she wasn’t a prop to Him. She was a person.

When God looks at us, he sees more than the worst decisions we’ve ever made.

I worry that we use one another as props even today, when we try like the Pharisees to illustrate “What is Right.” We have a terrible tendency to see only decisions, and in doing so we dehumanize the people behind them.

Too often, we don’t care about righteousness or truth. We just care about being right.

©LPi