Neither Do I Condemn Thee Is Said After the Crowd Leaves

A woman told me she has a rule about the fourth conversation.

By the fourth conversation with somebody new, she tells them. Not because she wants to. Because she has worked out that being told by somebody else is worse, and because the not telling starts to feel like a lie at about the fifth.

She said she has done it maybe forty times and it has never once got easier, and that she can feel her own pulse in her neck while she says it.

And she said the worst version is when they already knew, and were being kind about it, and now she has made them sit through it as well.

I am not going to give her a technique for that. I do not have one and anybody selling one has never had to do it.

What I have is a scene, and it is a scene where somebody is dragged into a square specifically as an exhibit, and where the ending is quieter and stranger than most people remember.

The scene is designed to be public

She is brought into the temple court, in the morning, in front of a crowd that had gathered to hear teaching, and set in the middle.

Set in the midst. The text says it twice. She is placed, deliberately, where everybody can see, and the men who brought her say out loud what she was caught doing.

Nobody in that scene is interested in her. She is a device in an argument between men about a legal question, and everybody present knows it, including her.

And then Jesus does something that has been discussed for two thousand years and that nobody can explain: He bends down and writes on the ground.

Whatever He wrote, the effect of it is recorded plainly:

And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. (John 8:9, King James Version)

One by one. Beginning at the eldest. The crowd empties. Not all at once, which would be dramatic; one at a time, which is worse for them and slower and completely real.

You are in a scene where the crowd is not the last thing left standing. John 8:9 has them going out one by one until only two people remain. It is the Spirit of God, John 16:8 who convicts, who does the work in a room that no argument achieves.

What He says, and what He does not say

Then there are two people in a square, and He speaks first.

When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more. (John 8:10-11)

Neither do I condemn thee. The one Person present entitled to condemn does not.

And then: go, and sin no more. He does not skip that half and neither will I, because a message that leaves it out is not the one He gave. He is not indifferent to what happened and He says so in four words.

But notice the order. The condemnation is dealt with first, and the instruction comes after, and He does not make the second the price of the first.

That order is the whole gospel and it is also the exact reverse of how disclosure usually feels. A person telling somebody new expects to have to earn the not condemning by explaining, by performing regret, by proving the instruction has already been kept. In that square, none of that happens.

You are not required to earn the sentence that comes first. John 8:11 puts neither do I condemn thee before go, and sin no more. It is His Spirit, 1 Corinthians 6:11 saying ye are washed, ye are sanctified, by the Spirit of our God, who did the work that makes that order possible.

The sentence Paul writes in the present tense

Paul says the same thing without a story attached, in a courtroom word.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. (Romans 8:1)

Now. Present tense, and it is not conditional on how a conversation goes on a Thursday.

Which is worth having in your pocket before the fourth conversation, because the thing a person is actually afraid of in that moment is a verdict. They are afraid the new person will look at them and something will be decided.

And the verdict that counts was handed down somewhere else, before the conversation, and does not get revised by what a colleague thinks over coffee.

You are walking into that conversation with the verdict already handed down elsewhere. Romans 8:1 says there is therefore now no condemnation, and it is the Holy Spirit, named in the very next verse as the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, who is credited with the freeing.

And if the telling has begun to cost more than you have, say it out loud to a person who is safe first: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. Nobody should be doing a fortieth disclosure with their pulse in their neck and no one in their corner.

The tense Paul uses about a whole list

There is a passage where Paul lists a great many things people had been and then changes tense.

And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6:11)

And such were some of you. Past tense, and he does not pretend the list is fictional. He says it about the people he is writing to, by name of category, and does not soften it.

But ye are washed. Three times, present tense, and every one of them is passive: washed, sanctified, justified. Somebody else did all three.

So Paul does exactly what a person in a fourth conversation cannot do for themselves: he states the history plainly and then states the current status plainly, and lets both stand.

You have a past stated in the past tense and a status stated in the present. 1 Corinthians 6:11 says such were some of you and then ye are washed. It is the same Spirit, named in that same verse in the words by the Spirit of our God, who is credited with all three verbs.