Sermons
August 17, 2025 (Proper 15)
“Put your rocks down.”
John 7:53—8:11
Whenever there’s a discussion about moral issues in church, somebody inevitably says, “Well, the Bible says we’re to hate the sin, but love the sinner.” But does it? And can it even be done?
If you Google the phrase, you will find a variety of opinions on the subject. People will bring up Bible passages that they interpret as saying that we are indeed called to hate the sin, but love the sinner. But others look at those same passages and insist they say no such thing. So what are we to believe?
Let’s look for a moment at the passage I chose for this morning.
The first thing to get out of the way is that most scholars don’t believe it belongs in the Gospel of John. They say it sounds—in vocabulary, in style, and in theology, more like one of the other three Gospels, most particularly Luke.
I tend to agree with them; but I don’t agree with the decision of the Revised Common Lectionary folks to leave it out because it’s not in the earliest manuscripts of the Fourth Gospel. Frankly, it’s a good story and tells us some important things about Jesus and how he related to sinners.
The passage Lyssa read today shows some of the Jewish religious leaders trying to put Jesus to the test. They bring a woman who has been caught in adultery to Jesus, and cite provisions in the Law that require such a woman to be stoned to death. They want Jesus’ opinion.
Now, Jesus and the scribes and Pharisees asking the question belonged to a people who were subjects of the Roman Empire. And the Roman Empire did not grant authority to their subject people to carry out executions like this. So one part of the test is to see if Jesus will agree she should be stoned to death, and if so they can report him to the Roman authorities for it.
The other part of the test is whether or not he will follow the law and condemn the woman, even if they’re not actually allowed to execute her. It is true that the Law requires a woman caught in adultery to be stoned to death. But both Leviticus 20:10 and Deuteronomy 22:22 say that both parties in an adulterous act are to be stoned, not just the woman.
The scribes and Pharisees here have only brought the woman. Where did the man go?
The test to see whether Jesus will follow the Law and condemn the woman is faulty, because the Law says to stone both, and they’ve let the man go.
Jesus’ response to them points out a big problem with “hate the sin, love the sinner.” The problem is that the people who brought that woman to Jesus were selective in what sins they chose to hate. As always, other people’s sins are more interesting than our own—especially when those other people’s sins have to do with the parts of the body normally covered by a bathing suit.
They want the Law enforced on this woman, but like they say, “It takes two to tango”—where is the man? By only bringing her and not him, they are violating the Law they are trying to see if Jesus will uphold. And if the woman’s violation is a sin, then so is theirs.
So he says, “Put your rocks down, and check yourself.” When they do, they just…melt away.
I think another major problem with this saying—which is not in the Bible explicitly, and I would argue there’s not a passage in the Bible that can be interpreted as meaning that we are called to “hate the sin but love the sinner”—is this:
“Hate the sin, love the sinner” sets up a mindset in which another’s sin is kept at the forefront, and we treat them accordingly—which is hardly loving. We just are not good at separating a person and their actions in our minds. History has shown that we’ve got the “hate the sin” part pretty much nailed down, but tend to fall way short on “love the sinner.”
Well, people might say, there are places in the Bible where God is described as hating certain sins. And sure, that’s true.[1] But God is able to separate a person’s sinful behavior from their worth as one created in God’s image and beloved of God. And we’re not God.
We do well to follow Jesus, who was accused of being a “friend of tax collectors and sinners.”[2] How did he treat sinners? He welcomed them and ate with them—something that utterly scandalized the good religious folks of his day.[3]
Someone else might say, “Well, Jesus told this woman, ‘from now on do not sin again,’” as though that vindicates us judging a person we consider to be a sinner. But again, we may follow Jesus, we may strive to be more and more like him every day; but we’re not capable of stopping any person from sinning by our own efforts or our own words—not even ourselves.
Jesus, on the other hand, is. We know from all the stories told of him in the Gospels—not to mention the story of Paul’s conversion in Acts 9—that anyone who met Jesus went away transformed. hey were not the same again.
Could this woman have been transformed by her encounter with Jesus, so that she was able to put her sin behind her? I think so.
The biggest argument against our being called to “hate the sin but love the sinner,” beyond the reality that it can’t actually be done by our fallible human minds and hearts, is that God doesn’t call us to hate. God calls us to love.
God does not call us to love, while also keeping a person’s sins in mind. And it doesn’t matter what those sins might be, whether they’re big or small, whether they have to do with the words people say, the work they do, what they might be doing when the lights are off, or anything else. God just calls us to love, and leave judgment and sin management to God.
Let God worry about “hating the sin.” God is able to do something about it—God in Christ demonstrated that in his every encounter with people their friends and neighbors considered to be sinners.
We aren’t. As Jesus’ parable of the weeds among the wheat[4] told us, we’re just not even all that good at determining who is and who is not a sinner, and our attempts to do away with sinful people and sinful behavior in our midst often does more harm than good.
So our job—our only job—is to love. Period.
[1] See, for instance, Amos 5:21-24, in which God appears to say he hates hypocrisy; or Malachi 2:16, in which the prophet, speaking for God, says, “I hate divorce.”
[2] Matthew 11:19; Luke 7:34
[3] Matthew 9:10-13; Mark 2:15-17; Luke 5:29-32; see also Luke 7:36-50.
[4] Matthew 13:24-30