Sand-Writing

Sand-Writing

                His work-calloused finger traced through the sand and dust on the stone floor of the Temple courts.  He was just sitting there, teaching a crowd of people, when we stormed in, interrupting him with our perfect question!  I was so young and misled by the older experts, but it was so energizing.  We were going to trap him in his own words, one way or the other.

                But, he quietly ignored our noisy, angry demands, and closed his eyes, slowly bending and scratched on the stones beside his humble perch.  That just made us more angry, at first.  But, it was confusing, and defusing all at once!  I was in the back of our group and it was difficult to see.  “What was he writing?!” was surely the question on the minds of others besides me!

                Most did not want to talk about it the next day.  We had been caught in our own snare.  His calm demeanor was intriguing, at least it was to me.  He distracted the gaze of the crowd away from that pawn, that prostitute, that non-person.  He deflected the anger of our group upon himself.

                What he wrote that day was blown away with the next breeze, a cooling wind, much like he cooled our angry hearts.  It was as if, all at once, he was accusing and excusing our sins, all of us.  Some said he wrote names, dates, … and with his other hand wiped them away as soon as they were written.

                Then he stood up and looked into our eyes, into our very hearts, and put the challenge back into our hands, “…without sin, throw first…”  Then he took his seat and continued scratching on the Temple court floor.  He put into our hands the stones; but, I suggest, he put, into the hands of God, he committed her fate.  He trusted God to deliver!  That was years ago, but I again heard similar words from Him, groaned from his bruised face as he hung there between Heaven and Earth!

                I was the last to leave that day.  I overheard his calm, non-critical voice comfort that frightened, pitiful soul, hers and mine!  For decades now I have tried to live by those words,  “Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again.”  I was such a sinner!  So calloused, so shallow, so hard, so …  I think we would have beat the life out of her in the very shadow of the Temple. 

                I think back on that day, so many years ago, and am convinced that same finger, that wrote on the stones of the floor at the Temple mount, once wrote on the stone tablets Moses brought down from the mountain of God!  Oh, that we could read what he wrote.  But, he did write on my heart that day!  And, she never forgot that day!