Jesus - fully human and fully divine.

​I wrote my last message about something that came form my class on John so, I thought that I would share another. Charles Filmore wrote ‘The Mysteries of John’ and Elizabeth Sand Turner wrote ‘Your Hope of Glory’ each of which examine John and provide metaphysical interpretation. However, there has always been a mystery that I have not understood and each of these authors seem, rather cunningly, to avoid!! This ‘mystery’ appears in John 8: 1-11 where, whilst Jesus is teaching in the temple, the scribes and Pharisees bring a woman who had been caught in adultery and say to him that the law of Moses commands that she be stoned and ask ‘Now what do you say?’. 
 
The mystery, for me, is what Jesus does next because he bends down and writes on the ground with his finger. They keep questioning him, so he straightens up and says, “let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her”. He then again bends down and writes on the ground again. The scribes and Pharisees, led by the elders, then depart so that Jesus is alone with the woman and he straightens up again and tells the woman to go on her way and not sin again. 
 
So, what did he write? I have heard it suggested that he was simply buying time to come up with a good answer or that he was continuing his teaching not seeing the interruption from the scribes and Pharisees as particularly important (a board covered in sand was typically used for teaching children in those days). However, in researching this I came across an interesting quote from the Hebrew scriptures, and we need to remember that the scribes, Pharisees and Jesus would have been well versed in their scriptures. In Jeremiah 17:13 it says ‘O Lord, the hope of all Israel, all who forsake You shall be ashamed. “Those who depart from Me shall be written in the earth, because they have forsaken then Lord, the fountain of living water” (KJV); the quotation marks meaning that it was God speaking. The translations in the NRSV, NIV and Jewish Study Bible are slightly different but all show condemnation of Judah. 
 
This raises an interesting point: was Jesus writing the names of the scribes and Pharisees ‘in the earth’ and hence condemning them? It would make sense that he ‘bent down’ to a lower state of consciousness and then straightened up again to deal with them from a higher level of consciousness. I like this interpretation because it shows the human side of Jesus and would support the premise of us each being ‘fully human and fully divine’. It demonstrates that our way-shower also had times of frustration and annoyance and dipped down in consciousness to His more human side. It also shows that to respond to life’s challenges effectively I need to raise my consciousness and tune into my divinity. For me, this is a wonderful illustration and makes it more possible for me to aspire to be like Jesus. 
 
Rev Paul Mapletoft
Unity minister

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