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?” John 8:3-5

We know the story because the line that Jesus says “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to cast the stone“ is perhaps one of the most overused and misquoted lines in the world, Christian or secular. Before we get all self-righteous about the teachers of the law who brought the woman to Jesus (after all, we know how it ends; they didn’t), we need to ask ourselves if we do the same thing today.

How so, you ask? Perhaps not to the extreme as these individuals, but we tend to skew things our way. What about the half truths we tell? They told Jesus a half truth about this woman. What about our quickness to judge a person’s intelligence or skill based on a person’s skin color or how they dress? You say it doesn’t happen. Wrong, it does. And probably more than we like to admit.

Twenty years ago in Bible school I so judged an individual. He didn’t dress up to our dress code at school (business casual) because he wore tennis shoes. He looked Hispanic and I looked down on him every time I saw him. Months later I found out that my brother in Christ happened to be from South Africa, part-time pastored a church in a rough area of town while going to school full time, and since the U.S. laws prohibited him from working full time, he and his family did what they could to scrape by. And yes, that meant foregoing new dress shoes. (would it have been so terrible if he was Hispanic and a poor man just trying to get a Bible education? Not at all!)

You see, I cast that first few stones and they all came back to hit me right smack in the head.