A New Look at the Adulturous Woman in John 8, by Orson Scott Card

I found this story by Orson Scott Card in his book Speaker for the Dead to be very telling about the misconceptions in the world about the nature of Christlike forgiveness.

A Great Rabbi stands, teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death.

There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine - a Speaker for the Dead - has told me of two other Rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.

The Rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. 'Is there any man here,' he says to them, 'who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?' 

They murmur and say, 'We all know the desire, but Rabbi none of us has acted on it.'

The Rabbi says, 'Then kneel down and give thanks that God has made you strong.' He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, 'Tell the Lord Magistrate who saved his mistress, then he'll know I am his loyal servant.'

So the woman lives because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.

Another Rabbi. Another city. He goes to her and stops the mob as in the other story and says, 'Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.'

The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. ‘Someday,’ they think, ‘I may be like this woman. And I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her as I wish to be treated.’

As they opened their hands and let their stones fall to the ground, the Rabbi picks up one

of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head and throws it straight down with all his might it crushes her skull and dashes her brain among the cobblestones. ‘Nor am I without sins,’ he says to the people, ‘but if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead – and our city with it.’

So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.

The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis and when they veer too far they die. Only one Rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation.

So of course, we killed him.

Commandments: All you need is love!

The fundamental problem with the Law of Moses wasn't the Law, itself, but rather, as the Bible Dictionary puts it, "the Law was worshipped more than the Lord." The way I see it, the Mosaic Law was intended as a minimum standard. It set the bar. The Pharisees, however, started to nit-pick every detail and made it into exact limits of what they could and couldn't do. So, instead of exceeding the expectations of the Law, they - at best - would approach its expectations and jump at every shortcut they could see. In essence, they emphasized the dos and don'ts more than the symbolism and
representations.

When Christ fulfilled the Law, he didn't scrap expectations altogether. It seems much of Christianity believes that since people were not reaching the standard of the Law of Moses, Christ instead enabled us to under-perform and still be saved.

On the contrary, he concluded the Sermon on the Mount commanding perfection. The same level of perfection as our Father in Heaven, even. Now, instead of doing everything we can to approach the bar, we have the Atonement of the Christ that helps us to "deny [ourselves] of all ungodliness" (Moroni 10:32).

Day by day, repentance allows us to stand a little taller. My first companion and I had a great conversation once about our language. We were debating for a good chunk of time what words constituted swearing. Eventually, we realized we were both missing the whole point. Good language isn't about avoiding this list of ten words, and using these five other words sparingly. Really, any word that we use that has a bad feel to it, we decided to avoid. We weren't perfect with it, but as we went, words that we hadn't even included in our conversation as potential swear words felt unnatural and distasteful. This commandment, as with all others, is not about setting the bar; it's about raising the bar every single day.

Tithing, it is interesting to note, is one of only two parts of the lower law still practiced in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And yet we still make it, more than anything else, into a list of dos and donts. "Do we pay 10% of our gross income or our net income?" "Should I pay tithing on my Social Security benefits or child support?" "Do we tithe dividends made from investments, or just real income?" All these questions simply miss the point. Quite honestly, they are all fairly Pharisaic. The higher law version of tithing is consecration, where we give all that we can. That will be FAR more than 10% of our gross income and our benefits and our investment increases, I'm sure. And you know what? I don't believe the prophet will ever announce in General Conference that it is time for us to
consecrate. I believe that will come person by person, as we forget the list-making and being truly coming closer to the Lord and becoming like Him.
These examples can be extended to Sabbath day worship, the Law of Chastity, the Word of Wisdom, personal prayer, Family Home Evening, scripture study, and every single other commandment God has ever revealed to the world. The day we live these laws perfectly is the day we are translated. If

Patience unto Perfection

I learned a lot this past transfer. After a little over eight months in one area, I really came to love Freedom and all the people there. To jump into a brand new area for my first time threw me off quite a bit for a little while. I missed the heck out of some people, and while I never doubted why I was on a mission, I was certainly frustrated a time or two about things not quite being exactly how they were in Freedom, at times forgetting the countless blessings of being in Warsaw. Now, this whole ramble here is not really what my post is about, but it sets the stage for why I spent two weeks studying a lot about patience. What I learned seemed pretty cool to me.

In the closing of the Sermon on the Mount, the Savior admonishes us to be as perfect as our Father in Heaven. That is quite a statement! Luckily, in the third to last verse of the Book of Mormon, Moroni explains to us just how to go about attaining perfection:

"Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him."

How cool is that? When we come unto Christ, we can become perfect. But wait! In Ether, Moroni laments that he isn't nearly as eloquent as a writer as the Brother of Jared, and in Ether 12:27 Christ tells Moroni something interesting about what happens when we come to Him:

"And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness." 

Whoa, whoa, whoa. So if we come unto Christ, we can be perfected.... and be shown our imperfect weaknesses? Precisely. That same verse continues:

"I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them."

See, Christ's Atonement isn't about just turning a blind eye towards the gaps in our strengths; it's about filling those gaps and truly perfecting us.

Now, I had introduced this post talking about patience. Well, in the scriptures, the words "patience" and "long suffering" are used pretty interchangeably. How fitting is that? When we want something and we can't have it, we quite literally suffer inside. As I've studied patience, I've found it quite literally embodies everything else that Christ has asked us to base our lives around.

"Faith embodies patience," Stephen Covey said. "It is a contradiction for someone to think or feel he has faith but lacks patience.... Patience is faith in action. Patience is emotional diligence."

So why do we have patience in the first place? Because we truly believe that good things are coming. We have faith in the promises of Jesus Christ, that any level of trial and struggle we go through "shall give [us] experience, and shall be for [our] good" (Doctrine and Covenants 122:7). Since we know that things will all work out, we might as well wait patiently for them.

Of course, it's not always so easy, but I really like the advice Paul gave in Romans 5:3-5:

"And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope: And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us."

Let's just glory in these hard times, because we have faith that it is only through these challenges that we will truly perfect ourselves through Christ, our Lord! Alma said something fairly similar at the