Common Ground
6 min read
7 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.” 8 Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
John 8:7-8
I wonder what Jesus was writing on the ground. Maybe Psalm 145:9 - The LORD is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made.
The judgmentalism and the hardness of people’s hearts is really astonishing sometimes. These so-called teachers and leaders of the community were more than willing to sacrifice the life of woman in order to trap Jesus so that they might have a reason to kill Him too!
And when we read episodes like this today, it is too easy for Christians to cast our own judgment on the “teachers of the law and Pharisees” for their hypocrisy and hardened hearts. But stories like this are not only meant to show us the heart of God in Jesus Christ and the hardness of the Jewish people in Jesus’s day, these stories are meant for our own personal reflection—about how hard-hearted and cruel we ourselves can be sometimes.
It is too easy for people to think the worst of other people, but when it comes to our own lives, we consider ourselves to be deserving and worthy of God’s grace and compassion. After all, I’ve had a tough life. I’ve experienced some real trauma. I was raised in a dysfunctional environment.
Among Christian communities today, I see this hard-heartedness manifested in a subtle—and sometimes not so subtle—exclusivity. There is a certain “not in my back yard” attitude that everyone has because of sin. But that “NIMBY” attitude is expressed through an obsessive need to control who is in the circle of people we fellowship with.
Not that I am holier than anyone, but in my life, I have hung out with college professors, highly-educated professionals, and also jocks, rednecks, bikers, and drug addicts of various ethnicities. One thing that I have learned is that every community of peoples has similar hopes and ambitions, as well as similar interpersonal dynamics.
We tend to think that “those people over there” are drastically different from “us”—practically to the point of thinking of them as aliens from another planet. For sure, people from different communities have differences. But it has been my experience that people are more alike than they are different.
Unfortunately (without any intention of being judgmental myself), not many people have the patience to break through the differences to find a common ground of humanity. Sometimes those differences can be very disruptive because sometimes people insist on emphasizing the differences rather than the common ground, so it pays to be careful and wise about such things. But it is in that common ground of humanity that we might find the image of God in us all.
I believe that our Canvas community is more “enlightened” than most Christian communities in such matters, and I believe we will continue to mature in that regard. But it does take a conscientious effort.
Father, Forgive me and forgive us for any exclusivism that we practice because of sin. Help us to be more open-minded and open-hearted to be able to embrace and enfold people who might be even just slightly different from us. Help us to have Your compassion. Help me and help us to see the image of God in everyone. In Jesus’s name. Amen.
