One of the scenes in the Gospel of John has provided fodder for centuries of speculation. What did Jesus “write in the sand?” You remember the scene–

“Early in the morning [Jesus] arrived again in the temple area, and all the people started coming to him, and he sat down and taught them. Then the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and made her stand in the middle. They said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women.* So what do you say?” They said this to test him, so that they could have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger. But when they continued asking him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he bent down and wrote on the ground. And in response, they went away one by one, beginning with the elders. So he was left alone with the woman before him. Then Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She replied, “No one, sir.” Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, [and] from now on do not sin any more” (Jn. 8:1-11).

If I were to guess what Jesus drew on the ground I would guess that after first smoothing the sand he drew a large circle with lots of finger-pressed dots inside. Then I imagine Jesus pushing his finger into the ground outside the circle. And I suspect what he did next, and what made the scribes and the Pharisees go away (upset), was that he erased the circle in the sand, and redrew another circle large enough to include the one lone dot that had previously been on the outside of the circle like the adulterous woman on the outside of this male-dominated, religiously rigid way of framing life and what or who was right or acceptable or good or pure. Hoping to entrap him on his interpretation of the law, he subverts their agenda not merely by avoiding their question with a question of his own, but by revealing that they were asking the wrong question. Jesus’ concern was not what was legal. but what was just.

To be an APPRENTICE OF JESUS, to live the Christ-life, necessarily means to learn and live Jesus’ ethic of radical inclusion that flew in the face of the dominant culture of his time and which flies in the face of those same forces today. The gospel of life that Jesus proclaimed and embodied involved the inversion of the geometry of religion peddled and promoted by those with power and privilege. In today’s language, Jesus had a problem with boundaries. He was always in the habit of erasing them. He continually challenged the boundaries that protected, and favored those in power who drew them. Whenever the power brokers drew a circle you can be assured they placed themselves and their interests at the center.

The geometry of Jesus’ teachings and life irritated and threatened the presiders of the dominant culture, the civic culture, and the ecclesial culture, by suggesting their center could not hold. His ethic of radical inclusion and his embodiment of the wide embrace of God upset the good order designed by the presiders of both the civic and church community who drew a privileged number in and an excluded population out. Contrary to the architects and arbiters of the prevailing arrangement of things, Jesus’ ethic favored the anawim, those on the margins, those pushed OUTSIDE the edge of family, neighborhood, faith community, and society. Jesus taught the geometry of God’s heart. Redrawing the hard and fast lines of the status quo, Jesus asserted it was those outcasts, outsiders, outlaws, out-of-bounds, out-in-left-field who were paradoxically the most central and most dear to God. Unlike the elders who were hell-bent on judging the woman they menacingly brought “to stand in the middle” only long enough to be condemned and stoned to death, Jesus brought into the life-giving circle of God’s embrace the most vulnerable who had been pushed to the periphery of society’s concern.

The Hebrew scriptures, especially as seen in the books of the Prophets, make it clear that God has a soft-spot for the anawim. Those deemed “the least of these” by society were (and are) of the greatest concern to God. The late, great Catholic biblical scholar Raymond Brown wrote:

Although this title [“Anawim”] meaning the ‘Poor Ones’ may have originally designated the physically poor (and frequently still included them), it came to refer more widely to those who could not trust in their own strength but had to rely in utter confidence upon God: the lowly, the poor, the sick, the downtrodden, the widows and the orphans. The opposite of the Anawim were not simply the rich, but the proud and self-sufficient who showed no need of God or [God’s] help.

Incarnating the compassionate acceptance and hospitality of God, Jesus erases the lines that say KEEP OUT! Placing the anawim at the center of his concern, teaching, and ministry, Jesus reaches out to all the excluded and invites them in to where they have always been, but did not know it: the heart of God.

It is fair to say that it was Jesus’ ethic of radical inclusion that led to his torture and execution. Nailed to the cross, Jesus consciously and lovingly aligns himself with all the marginalized of the world. Hanging on the cross, Jesus intentionally and compassionately offers those excluded ones the wide embrace of God. In this defining act of solidarity, his outstretched arms on the cross offer the symbol of the length of the divine reach and wide embrace which alone are the saving and challenging response to the desecrating and dehumanizing consequences of exclusion. Later, his resurrection proclaims not even driven spikes can prevent the wide reach of divine love.

PRACTICE:

This week, this month, our spiritual practice is to apprentice to the artist Jesus. Draw a circle in the sand. Erase it. Draw a wider circle. Repeat often.