Abstract
In the story of the adulterous woman, Jesus is remembered to have saved a woman’s life by writing on the ground. What he wrote, however, is not preserved in any tradition. That hasn’t stopped commentators from imagining what he might have written. But why imagine he wrote at all? Why imagine there's “content” there to be interpreted? Perhaps when confronted with an ethical dilemma he wanted no part of, Jesus simply bent down and began to doodle. If so, then what matters is the fact that he doodled, the shapes and the size and the squiggly lines of his doodling. In this article, I want to offer a reading of John 7:53-8:11 that engages with the very act of Jesus's wordless doodling. I then want to try and tease out a few ethical principles from this doodling. By focusing on a story where Jesus was remembered primarily for his gestures and not simply his speech, and by reimagining a Christian ethics that emerges from the space opened up by those gestures, we are keeping front and center the conviction that Christian ethics is a matter of style.
A hairstyle is not ‘about’ anything.
1
Early in the morning he returned to the temple. 2 All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery, and placing her in the midst of the people, said to him, ‘Teacher, Moses commanded us to stone such women. What do you say?’ Everyone was waiting for his answer, but he didn’t say anything. He simply bent down and scribbled in the dust.
What did he write? 3
Tradition hasn’t preserved his writing, and it’s debatable whether the historical Jesus could write in the first place. Perhaps he didn’t write words or letters at all—why are theologians always imagining what Jesus would say? Maybe he merely doodled a few shapes or cartoons.
Whatever Jesus drew was sufficient to save the life of the woman. Perhaps, we reason, the accusers felt challenged or even shamed by Jesus’s creation. But why should we even assume that they were able to read and interpret what Jesus wrote? People certainly misunderstood his parables; why should his drawings be any different? For that matter, why assume that everyone had the same interpretation of his scribblings?
Thomas Deans has catalogued several of the more popular interpretations of Jesus’s doodlings, noting, “Those jottings in the sand trigger an itch and an exegetical scratch.” 4 In each of these homiletic or theological interpretations, Jesus’s writing is read. Interpreted. The fact that Jesus wrote is inconsequential to many a scholar. For instance, as Raymond Brown concludes, Jesus’s writing on the ground ‘adds nothing important’ to the real meaning of the story. 5 The theological import, in this perspective, can be grasped apart from the creation of Jesus’s scribbling fingers. If we want to go further, then we can offer commentary on what his doodling might mean. But why must the content of Jesus’s doodling be interpreted? Why can’t it simply be seen? Encountered? Appreciated on its own terms?
In Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag takes aim at a ‘subtle philistinism’ 6 that has infiltrated criticism—namely, the idea ‘that a work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something.’ 7 According to this perspective, a work of art is entirely reducible to what it says, is what it says. ‘The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really—or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?’ 8
Although commentators don’t often think of Jesus’s scribblings as works of art, they nonetheless approach those scribblings just like Sontag’s “Philistine” critics. They don’t pay much attention to Jesus’s scribbling—the act of it, the shape and texture of it—focusing instead on guessing at and interpreting what it must mean.
There is obviously no escaping interpretation, and Sontag knows it. But if we’re going to do it, then we should aim at the right kind of criticism. ‘What kind of criticism, of commentary on the arts, is desirable today? For I am not saying that works of art are ineffable, that they cannot be described or paraphrased. They can be. The question is how.’ 9 The answer, for her, is to focus on form, to appreciate form, to zero in on form, and to never, ever lose focus. ‘If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary . . . of forms.’ 10 We do not need to take a work of art into our hands and squeeze ‘the maximum amount of content’ out of it. Instead, Sontag sees it as our task ‘to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all’. 11 What’s important ‘is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.’ 12
Let’s mosey on back to the sand, then, and try to experience more.
What do we hear when Jesus bends down to scribble? A noisy crowd gradually quieting down. The dry heaves of the woman about to be stoned. The occasional rustle of a garment as onlookers shift their weight from one foot to the other. An impatient, throaty hum from a man eager for Jesus to say something stupid. Then there’s the sound of a man’s fingers—more than one? His index, perhaps, or maybe his pinky?—caressing the ground. Jesus, self-possessed and cool, might’ve taken his time with his writing. The sound of the movement of his fingers was relaxed, sensual; his strokes were long; the shhhh sound he produced in the dust was echoed by the older folks closest to him as they tried to quiet down those in the back.
What does Jesus look like when he draws? Are his strokes fast or slow, choppy or long? I imagine he took his time. But didn’t the situation call for a speedy decision? Bending down to doodle once? Ok . . . but a second time? Perhaps he was vamping, buying time, and so he proceeded as slowly as possible. While he was down there, maybe he allowed his eyes to pass over all the feet that surrounded him as he planned, prayed, hoped for a way out, a way forward. He doesn’t seem worried the crowd will erupt, but he had to know that every second he spent doodling was a second not spent telling people to put down their stones. His doodling, then, is out of place: it is an incongruent response to a dire situation.
Did Jesus’s second doodling continue the first? Or did he change his mind about his first creation and bend down to start over. Instead of asking what he wrote, why not ask what he erased? How much of it he erased? Why assume Jesus knew what he was going to draw until he began to draw it? Most of us don’t know exactly what we are going to create until we set out to create it. Maybe Jesus wrote in the sand so he could figure out what to write in the sand. Maybe he scribbled to work out his own thoughts on the matter.
Or maybe he scribbled so he could let his mind go. Maybe he was running his fingers across the ground meditatively, to quiet himself so that he would be prepared to act. Did the sand serve as his own little Zen garden, allowing his fingers to sensually caress the ground, in rhythm with his inhale-exhale?
Rather than scribbling in order to communicate, maybe Jesus scribbled to stop the conversation. Perhaps he refused to participate in a legal debate over human life. That wasn’t a conversation he was interested in having—who lives? who dies? these are questions for God alone to answer—so he didn’t engage. ‘In the minds of the ancients,’ writes Milan Kostrešević, ‘writing on ground, sand or dust was a behavior that by its nature did not communicate a certain content. This behavior expressed the subject’s address to himself. This act, which did not focus on the transmission of certain content, was in fact a sign indicating a lack of availability for interpersonal communication.’ 13 Jesus’s writing, then, on this reading, was content sans content. Content-less content. Content to be experienced but not interpreted. Content aimed at stopping interpretation, stopping communication, in its tracks.
Jesus was remembered in this instance not for any puns or theological insights or biblical exposition, but for wordless gestures. Of course, he eventually speaks (‘Where are your accusers?’) but it seems like the heavy lifting was accomplished before he opened his mouth. That’s where the narrative’s focus lies. 14 Not on a parable that Jesus tells, but the parable that he is. On his style, on the very him quality that makes him him.
Everything about this scene is physical: dust, fingers, bodies, tears, the sounds of heavy feet walking away in shame, in frustration, running away in relief, in freedom. If, as the Gospels insist, we learn something about God by watching everything Jesus does, then we should expect to learn something about God by noticing Jesus’s scribbling—the actual scribbling, the how not the what of it, the form not the content. Jesus is God’s style, God’s how—Jesus is how God gods with humanity. And God doesn’t know how to god that way until God, in Jesus, reaches his fingers into the dust of the earth and doodles.
It’s as if somewhere in deep time, somebody asked God what he was like, and God doodled a story. ‘There was once a man from Galilee . . .’
A Disrupting Kingdom
John 7:53–8:11 is likely not original to the fourth gospel, as Bible scholar and translator Bruce Metzger has argued. ‘The evidence for the non-Johannine origin of the pericope of the adulteress is overwhelming.’
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As Tommy Wasserman says, ‘only two of the seventeen earliest surviving copies of John in Greek contain the section of the Gospel that could include the [pericope adulterae (PA)]—in both cases the story is omitted’.
16
As for why it might have been added to the text, Chris Keith makes the case that it was inserted into its Johannine position ‘around the third century
But regardless of the reason for its interruption into the text, it is nonetheless just that: a disruption, a break, a breach of the text. It is ‘somewhat intrusive, interrupting the flow of Jesus’s discourses in the temple at the Feast of Tabernacles . . . . It is strangely disconnected from both what immediately precedes . . . and what follows.’ 19 Things are going along smoothly. John is making his theological points, narrating Jesus’s journey, and then, smack dab in the middle of all this, comes a story that doesn’t seem to fit.
And yet the story fits precisely because it doesn’t fit. It is fitting to a man who is unfitting. Jesus himself, as we learn from John’s opening verses, fits in a similar way: kind of and not really. His fitting is temporary, contingent, for-the-moment. The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, which can only mean that the word which sounds forth in the Word is a word on the move. As Marcella Althus-Reid says, If we considered that in the Gospel of John 1:14, the Verb is to have ‘dwelt among us’ as a tabernacle (a tent) or ‘put his tent amongst us,’ the image conveys Christ’s high mobility and lack of space or definitive frontiers. Tents are easily dismantled overnight and do not become ruins or monuments; they are rather folded and stored or reused for another purpose when old. Tents change in shape in strong winds, and their adaptability rather than their stubbornness is one of the greatest assets.
20
Christ comes and goes, back and forth, here and there. Who knows how long he'll be here? We are all on our way to Emmaus and have a feeling that this stranger might vanish at will! The Word is a disruption to, an interruption of, an irruption into flesh. So before we even get around to reading the PA, we know that Christ himself is a textual disruption, breaking into the text of the everyday, the text of the world, unsure of how the world might read him or respond to him.
One queer reading strategy is to read for disruptions. There are plenty in John 8 to be found. First, Jesus is in the middle of teaching when he’s disrupted by a group of people John labels as ‘scribes and Pharisees’. Second, Jesus’s listening audience, whom John calls ‘the people’, are disrupted during their learning. Third, the woman who is brought to Jesus experienced one of the worst disruptions: she was ‘caught in the middle of adultery’, which means she sadly didn’t get to finish. Fourth, the woman’s accusers are disrupted in their arguments by Jesus bending down and doodling. Fifth, while Jesus is scribbling on the ground, he is disrupted by his questioners, so he stops what he’s doing, unbends himself, and addresses the would-be stoners before ultimately returning to the ground to continue doodling. Sixth, whatever the scribes and Pharisees wanted, their plan is disrupted because they eventually leave the scene without a word. Seventh, sin is disrupted when Jesus simultaneously refuses to condemn it and invites the woman to live beyond it.
All these disruptions disrupt the process of interpretation. We readers are disrupted from drawing any fast conclusions about the entire ordeal because no matter how many times we return to Jesus’s doodling, we are forced to admit that we can never, ever know what it says. Jesus’s doodling disrupts our theology.
Watching Jesus Doodle
The pericope in John 7:53–8:11 presents a Jesus who responds to an ethical dilemma with wordless actions. By focusing on a story where Jesus was remembered primarily for his gestures and not simply his speech, and by reimagining a Christian ethics that emerges from the space opened up by those gestures, we are keeping front and center the conviction that Christian ethics is a matter of style. Of Jesus’s style.
We can begin to get at the style by paying attention to the most unfitting verse in the pericope. The story doesn’t start with 8:2 (‘Early in the morning he came again to the temple.’) but two verses earlier: ‘Then each of them went home, while Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.’ 21 This is bizarre, until we recall that a reference to the Mount of Olives carries great theological weight in the Second Temple period. 22 When we read the Mount of Olives, we begin to think along eschatological lines, about the absolute future that God will bring about dramatically, irrevocably, and with finality.
Jesus’s watchword for God’s absolute future is ‘kingdom of God’, (basileia tou theou). Defining this term is notoriously difficult, and the best definitions are the general ones: ‘the future which God will bring about’. 23 Clearly Jesus’s term is unimaginable apart from the Jewish eschatological apocalypticism that animates his ministry. There has been much discussion about the kingdom, and I am not equipped to nor that interested in participating in those discussions. What I am interested in, however, is Jesus’s doodling. ‘If I by the finger of God cast out demons, then the Kingdom of God is among you.’ 24 With the same finger, Christ exorcises demons, and doodles the kingdom. To be too precise about defining that kingdom would be like walking along a beach and interpreting a child’s sandcastle. Better just to pause and admire the child’s fun, to pay attention to how he’s up to whatever he’s up to.
Jesus, in his very embodiment, ‘venture[s] to live now out of the kingdom’, as Leander Keck puts it. ‘This means that from Jesus’s style, no less than from his words, one infers the conception of God’s kingship of which it is the reflex.’ 25 Elsewhere Keck calls Jesus’s life ‘the paradigm of the “already” in anticipation of the kingdom’, and claims that ‘the whole network of words, deeds, and death which we call “Jesus” was pulled into a pattern by the magnetic power of the kingdom.’ 26 Jesus’s Jesusness is nothing other than ‘a celebration of the kingdom’s coming.’ 27 To refer to Jesus’s style, then, is to refer to ‘the contour of his kingdom-shaped life’. 28 Jesus’s style is the Kingdom; the kingdom is Jesus’s style. If ‘the deity of God is his rule’, 29 the divinity of Jesus is his kingdom-ing. Jesus is, as Origen memorably put it, the autobasileia: the kingdom itself, the self-kingdom, the one who kingdoms. 30 Jesus is the one who shows the world how to world in new ways, in ways that correspond to a cannot-be-defined-in-advance kingdom that is slowly begin to spring up from the ground on which he is doodling. Jesus himself is a specific worlding of the world, of the world in the style of the kingdom, a kingdom which emerges from the breach of dust that his doodling finger teases open.
It is the style of Jesus, in the end, that made an impression on those who remembered him. They might not have remembered exactly what he said, but they remembered how he typically said what he said. They remembered the qualities that set him apart, marked him out, made him the one who kingdoms, the one who is the kingdom. When confronted with so and so, they later recalled, Jesus was the kind of person who, by God’s finger, did something like this. When something like that happened, they remembered, he would make this kind of pun, tell this kind of short story.
Our goal, then, is not to find ‘the authentic Jesus’ (whatever that could mean) by figuring out which of his words and sayings are ‘historical’, but to attend to his style, to take up the how question that insists throughout all strata of gospel history: How does Jesus world in a kingdom sort of way?
To get at this question, I want to reflect on Jesus’s doodling as it is preserved in the John 7:53–8:11 pericope. I want to focus on his doodling, the very act of his putting fingers in the dust and creating something. To watch him doodle is to study his style. We want to be careful, though: we don’t want to overinterpret his doodling actions in a way that would enrage Sontag. We want to home in on his movements, on his fingers, on the space his body occupies and re-appropriates and decorates. We want to focus on his doodling not to make sense of it, but to ‘get at’ the doodler. My wager is that if we pay attention to Jesus’s style in this particular pericope—not what he means, but what he does and how he does it—we will glean a few valuable insights that will help us begin to style ways-of-being after Jesus’s own.
In keeping with our theme of not wanting to over-interpret writing, I invite you to see these as doodles, jottings, scribblings. Their order does not imply any hierarchy, where each numbered note is a step in a process for ethical deliberation. They are simply some ideas that emerge when I flirt with Jesus’s performance in the temple. They are, like Jesus’s own doodlings, jottings in the sand.
Neighborly Presence
Jesus does not ask for a private word with the woman or her accusers. He does not take his students to a secluded corner of the temple courtyard to break down the ethics of the situation. Murder, like sin, is a community affair. So Jesus stays put. Whatever he does, he is going to do it with everyone. They are free to leave; Jesus is staying, come what may. Whether or not we want him to be, he is determined to be a neighbor to everyone disrupting his path.
Jesus probably disagrees with many of the choices of those around him. He isn’t a fan of adultery or infidelity; nor does he like hypocrisy and violence. But his beliefs about their present ways of life do not matter; what matters is the future that God wants to bring them, the future that has come near to them in his doodling finger. And so, when the scribes and pharisees and the unnamed adulterous woman and the onlooking crowd press in on Jesus, he simply closes his mouth as if to bring heightened awareness to the fact that he is present with them. In his very body, before he says anything, he is with them. For them. All of them. Those he agrees with and those he doesn’t. Those he thinks are on the right track and those whose ways are in urgent need of conversion. By being present to everyone he encounters, Jesus proves himself to be a neighbor to all.
Openness to surprise
Jesus is not primarily responding to his questioners, or even to the woman he’s life he wants to save. He is responding to God and God’s future. His ethic is one of ‘response to the apocalyptic action of God, which is at hand and already making its power felt’. 31 This future, Jesus believes, is actually more ‘real’ than the present; the future, in fact, determines the shape of the present. So Jesus gets quiet, listens for the future, and tries to bring the present into correspondence with it.
The men are about to disrupt a woman’s life, disrupt her family’s life, the lives of her children and the community which loves her. These men are also about to disrupt their own lives, their own development, by hurling a stone at a defenseless woman and becoming murderers. Jesus’s work, in this moment, is to disrupt the disruption, which he does with his body. Before he says a word, he disrupts the rhythm of the scene. He was being asked to join a quick step, but he slowed down and instead decided to dance a Viennese Waltz. In a scene of heightened drama, where every second counts, Jesus bending his body down to the ground is surprising because it comes across as cavalier. Jesus’s body and actions are surprisingly out of place in this moment.
Just as a group of men is about to shut the door to their and this woman’s future, Jesus holds it open. Presumably when this group of men picks up stones, death inevitably follows. 32 Cause leads to effect as surely as A leads to B. By disrupting this chain of events, Jesus reminds everyone that it is worth imagining a future that does not necessarily follow from the past. He doesn’t choose what the future should be; but by not performing the bodily ways-of-being they might have expected of him, he reminds them that the future is open. Just as Jesus will not always dance when he hears a flute or mourn when he hears a dirge, 33 so he will not now fall in line with the rhythm of whatever the crowd demands of his body. God’s future is radically open. Stones do not have to lead to execution. In God’s kingdom, they can lead to reconciliation.
Bodily Awareness
When the scribes and pharisees bring the woman before Jesus, he is sitting down. After they ask their question, Jesus bends down to doodle. After watching him for a few moments, the scribes and pharisees disrupt Jesus with more questions, prompting him to take a different posture. Many English translations say he stood up, righted himself, lifted himself up, etc., the idea being that he brought himself from the ground to a standing position. But there’s a different way of reading the action. In verses 6 and 8, Jesus bends down; in verse 7 he unbends down. But this unbending doesn’t necessarily mean he stood upright. I think it’s best to imagine Jesus on the ground the entire time, even if he positions himself a little higher in verse 7.
v. 6: Jesus bent down (kyptō) and wrote with his finger on the ground. v. 7: And as they continued to ask him, he unbent (anakyptō) and said to them, ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.’ v. 8: And once more he bent down (kyptō) and wrote on the ground.
Jesus’s two bending down actions form a kind of inclusio here, offering an interesting frame for the word and deed that are narrated in the middle. By surrounding Jesus’s words with his action of bending low, perhaps the narrator is calling attention to Jesus’s embodied humility. He regularly makes himself lower than those he encounters. In fact, as Paul would later say, it is precisely because of Jesus’s humility that God chooses to lift him up and give him a name before which everyone else must ‘bend down’. 34
Jesus’s God is the one who has his eyes on the bent-down of the earth. Jesus’s God is the one who bends down with the bent. Because he is with them, he is able to see their plight, and respond to it. God ‘adorns the humble with victory’, says one psalm. 35 On the other hand, God does not have patience for the haughty. ‘Behold, the Lord God of hosts will lop the boughs with terrifying power. The great in height will be thrown down, and the lofty will be brought low.’ 36 God, it seems, cares about where our bodies are located. In fact, he is the one who throws off the yoke of Egyptian slavery and causes his people to ‘walk upright’. 37
Jesus’s interactions with those around him are embodied. He literally has skin in the game. He responds with his whole person to those in need. He bends down, sits with them, breaks bread with them, touches their broken limbs, caresses their blind eyes, etc. In John 8, though we don’t know what posture he took when he stooped down, the very fact that he brought himself low to the ground demonstrates an embodied vulnerability on this part. If stones are about to be hurled, you don’t want to be anywhere near the ground on which they’re going to land. By occupying the ground, a place of almost-violence, Jesus physically inserts himself into the space between victim and oppressor. As he does, he creates a new third space into which both parties are invited. It is as if he is saying to everyone who can hear him, ‘There is more “here” than here. I am living in God’s kingdom, and you are free to join me. If you choose to do so, then you must reimagine your relationship with those rocks. And each other.’
A willingness to hold together tensions
Jesus does not get out of harm’s way. He occupies a space between two polarized parties, the accused and her accusers. Like a good prophet, Jesus ‘stands in the gap’ 38 between life and death, suffering and joy. Jesus is not diplomatic when it comes to evil (demons, for example, he commands to shut up and leave), 39 but he is incredibly skillful when it comes to managing interpersonal conflict. When the scribes and pharisees bring an adulterous woman to his attention, he intervenes with his body. He deescalates the building tension by intentionally slowing down and giving everyone the chance to catch their breaths. He does not mirror either the urgency of the accusers or the desperation of the accused. He respectfully and loyally offers his bodily presence to both parties and seems genuinely open to their responses.
Jesus’s willingness to hold together tensions highlights the overall work that he’s up to. Jesus bridges the chasm between the present and God’s future by present-ing God’s future in his physical person. The book of Colossians says that Jesus is the one in whom all things hold together: Heaven and earth, the beginning and the end, the visible and the invisible. 40 By standing in the space of difference, by occupying a place of distance, Jesus shows us what it will mean when the God of the future becomes all in all. Only the One who has been raised from the dead, and who has therefore experienced the totality both of absolute death and of God’s resurrection to come, can stand in the gap between the realms of life and death and make peace between them.
The interconnectedness of creation
The conviction that God makes all things new is not limited to human beings, which is why Jesus begins his ethical deliberation by touching the ground. He is reminding himself and everyone watching and remembering him of the interconnectedness of human action and the created world in which it takes place and has meaning. Jesus involves his Father’s creation in his moral deliberation.
Elizabeth Johnson reminds us that Scripture encourages us to ‘ask the beasts’. 41 In a similar way, the PA encourages us to ‘ask the ground’. Ancient bible stories, writes Pope Francis in Laudato Si, ‘bear witness to a conviction which we today share, that everything is interconnected, and that genuine care for our own lives and our relationships with nature is inseparable from fraternity, justice and faithfulness to others’. 42 When looking forward to the implementation of God’s future, the prophets often describe peace in environmental dimensions: wolves will lie down with lambs, lions will feast on hay, children will play with snakes. 43 The human moral order is part of the cosmic order. When human relations are disordered, the integrity of the created world is threatened. When human relations are lovingly ordered, the earth is at peace. Let’s not forget that in the New Jerusalem imagined by John, ‘the leaves of the tree [of life] are for the healing of the nations’. 44 Jesus’s scribbling on the ground is best interpreted within this framework: as a prophetic action insisting on the interconnectedness of all created life.
A respect for self-determination
Jesus does not tell the scribes and pharisees not to stone the woman. He simply creates a space to allow them to think through the ramifications of their acts. In the space he creates for them, they are the ones who determine their futures. Not even God can determine the shape of your life. You have a choice. Think it through.
Jesus offers to everyone he meets the power of self-determination, the power to respond in their own way and on their own terms to the compelling lure of God’s future. Unlike the scribes and pharisees, who force a woman to come before Jesus after ‘seizing’ her in the middle of a vulnerable moment of intimacy, Jesus does not control people. He merely invites them to respond to what God is doing.
A commitment to nonviolence
We’ve seen how Jesus strategically disrupts the urgency of the scene in John 8 with a laidback, almost detached attitude. This is striking for the fact that he is smack dab in the middle of a scene of violence. Even if the threat of death is merely rhetorical, there is plenty of violence to be found. For one thing, the woman’s sexual encounter was discovered, which means the men who found her already violated her by watching her without her knowledge. They also used force to take the woman away from her sexual partner and to bring her before Jesus.
She presumably did not want to be shamed in this way. I can’t imagine she didn’t try to escape her accusers, which means they likely had to physically overpower her. In contrast to all this violence, Jesus simply takes a moment to doodle on the ground. He does not meet force with force. He does not return violence for violence, even when—and this is a crucial point to make—another person’s life is on the line. Jesus seems convinced that it is possible to overcome violence without retaliating against it. 45 That’s why Jesus taught people to bless their enemies, to turn their left cheeks when smacked on the right, to lay down their swords. And Jesus was consistent about this, even going to his death without a fight, without defending himself. When one of his followers tries to intervene on his behalf by using a knife—badly, we might add, which only underscores the fact that the Jesus movement was not violent—Jesus actually scolds him.
Not that the long march to God’s kingdom has been without its share of bloodshed. But Allan Verhey reminds us of important context that we sometimes overlook. It is true that God has sometimes acted as a warrior, as in Exodus 15, where God is praised for being a ‘man of war’. 46 He is the one who hurled the Egyptians into the Red Sea. But his people, in contrast, simply walked away. ‘It is a stunning feature of the exodus narrative,’ says Verhey, ‘that the Israelites did nothing to bring about the destruction of the Egyptians. Moses told the people not that they should take up arms but that they should not be afraid’. 47 There are, of course, times in the Bible when God’s people fight on their own behalf, sometimes at the command of God. But that shouldn’t distract us from engaging with a theological idea that the Hebrew Bible often flirts with. God is a warrior; his people are not. 48 If force is required, let God use it. Our trust is not in swords and chariots, anyway.
Go and Doodle Likewise
Like many a story found in the gospels, Jesus’s doodling has sometimes been interpreted by commentators who, despite their best intentions, see Jesus as being in theological conflict with the Law of Moses. When they get to John 8, they like to imagine that Jesus wrote in the ground as if to tell his questioners, ‘Never mind what Moses wrote—look at what I’m writing.’ This conflict is taken to be an illustration of Jesus’s ministry to liberate people from the legalism of Torah by teaching them that God is actually gracious. But Jews do not need to be reminded of grace. God has always been merciful and forgiving and it makes no sense to pretend that the Jews of Jesus’s day didn’t know that.
Jesus did not see himself as either an enemy or editor of Torah. He saw himself as a doodler. He does not create new laws but responds to God’s eternal laws in creative ways. We should not, then, pit Jesus’s doodling against God’s writing. Jesus’s doodling, in fact, is a supplement to God’s writing, an expansion and an interpretation of it. Jesus does not doodle to replace Torah but to decorate it with shapes and figures and cartoons.
Benjamin D. Sommer has outlined what he calls a participatory theory of revelation, which is built on Abraham Heschel’s insight that ‘the Bible itself is a midrash’. 49 Sommer suggests we see the Bible not itself as ‘a revelation’ from God, but as ‘a response to God’s act of revelation’. 50 Revelation refers to a sense of commandedness—Scripture contains the human response to this sense of commandedness. ‘Israel completes the sentence that begins “God commands us to”, but God remains the subject, and the verb does not lose its basic meaning of requiring obedience.’ 51 Scripture, then, requires participation between humans and God. There is no Scripture without that participation.
This is how I like to think of Jesus’s doodling: as his embodied way of participating in the ongoing process of humans responding to God’s wordless revelation. The communities that remember Jesus are also participants in the dialogue that happens between Jesus and the God who commands us to. . .
Jesus’s doodling in the PA becomes a parable for this process of working out our ethics in real time. We’ve already said that this pericope is all about disruption, which is where difficult moral deliberation often happens. We are going along without a care in the world and suddenly, without warning, we are interrupted with a demand: ‘What do you say about this person? What do you think God says about them? How would you like to proceed?’ We don’t always know in advance how to behave ethically in a particular situation until we encounter that situation. Even with the Christian Scriptures and traditions as our guide, we still have to think and feel our way through a world that does not always world in a kingdom way. As Gaudium et Spes notes, ‘The church is guardian and deposit of God’s word and draws religious and moral principles from it, but it does not always have a ready answer to everything.’ 52 Which means we should expect to have to doodle on a regular basis.
When Jesus, in response to his challengers, bends down to scribble in the sand, maybe he recalls what he learned as a child about God’s own fingers, which have been remembered for out-performing Pharaoh’s magicians and writing the two tablets of stone. These memories do not determine the shape of Jesus’s doodling, per se, but they do interact with it and exert certain pressures on it. As a devout Jew formed by Jewish Scriptures and practices, Jesus has certain theological commitments to God, to himself, to his neighbors, to strangers, and to creation. He doodles the way he does because he has been formed in certain ways. His fingers may belong to God; they also belong to a rich dialogue that precedes and exceeds him.
Paula Fredriksen has called the gospels ‘a genre of Jewish scriptural improvisation’ that ‘“messianize” Jesus’ death’ and ‘“Davidize” Jesus’ life.’ 53 The gospels play into musical traditions that are already being played, and ‘stretch’ them in new directions. For all their ingenuity, however, the gospels are working ‘with the same biblical sheet music, sounding in [their] own way these shared scriptural notes’. 54 I have written about Jesus’s ethics and improvisation elsewhere. 55 Here I simply note that the concept of doodling I’m working with—impromptu, unplanned scribbling that comes from fingers that have been formed in certain ways—could be seen as a kind of improvisation. This way of theorizing Jesus’s doodling has ramifications for Christian ethics. If Jesus doodles in the style of Jesus, then Christians are those who also doodle in the style of Jesus. In other words, to be a Christian is to keep Jesus’s doodling going.
The fact that the PA is a late addition to John’s text only emphasizes the point I want to make about doodling. Whether the story reflects actual history is beside the point. 56 The Christians who were carrying on Jesus’s memory realized they too needed to doodle. And so they reached down into their inherited traditions and began to creatively remold Jesus so he could engage with situations that he did not actually encounter. Because the early Jesus followers believed that their risen Lord was the ‘present Christ,’ says Verhey, ‘the pattern for remembering him could not simply preserve his words.’ 57 If it was true that Christ was present in their midst, then so were his doodling fingers. ‘If we,’ they said, ‘by the finger of Jesus, doodle in just this way, then the kingdom will continue to grow.’
This brief historical sketch — from God’s revelation at Sinai to Israel’s writing in Torah to Jesus’s doodling in the gospels and finally to our continuation of this doodling — is obviously reductive, but I think it is possible, as a Christian, to point to a certain continuity in the world’s doodling response to God’s revelation. I am convinced that whether Jesus speaks in Mark or in Q or even in Paul, it is Jesus who speaks—even though he might not have ever uttered the words ascribed to him. ‘The developing tradition is not simply the words of men as contrasted to the “commandment of God,”’ says Verhey, ‘it is the manner by which the exalted Jesus continues to address his continuing church.’ 58 And so Jesus is remembered to have said things he didn’t say; in the memory of his saying them, he says them.
Jesus was remembered to have doodled things he doodled. . . and things he didn’t. When Jesus is remembered for doodling something he didn’t, he is nevertheless being remembered as a doodler. To imagine new horizons for Jesus’s doodling is to be, in the New Testament’s language, a disciple. If we are going to be faithful disciples of Jesus in the 21st century, then we ourselves are going to have to do some doodling. A servant is not greater than his master.
Conclusion
The Jesus we meet in the New Testament has certain tendencies, certain intensities. He’s doodling to the beat of his own drum. He doesn’t dance when he hears a flute; he doesn’t mourn when he hears a dirge. He gyrates like an attendee of a silent disco: onlookers can’t imagine what kind of music is blasting through his headphones. They can, however, see him moving—we can, too.
Luke Timothy Johnson, at the end of a short book that is very critical of some Jesus historians, notes that ‘the story of Jesus’ cannot be discovered in ‘a collection of facts or in terms of a pile of discrete pieces, but in terms of pattern and meaning.’ 59 There is, he states, quite emphatically, a character that emerges from the gospels and the New Testament as a whole.
To locate personhood in character is to pay attention to style. As Jean Cocteau says, ‘Style is the soul.’ 60 Sontag expounds on this thought. ‘In almost every case,’ she says, ‘our manner of appearing is our manner of being. The mask is the face.’ 61
In this article, I’ve tried to home in on Jesus’s style by engaging with the pericope found in John 7:53-8:11. Jesus doodles in the style of Jesus. I’ve tried to describe that style as best I can, but there’s only so much we can do with doodling. Jesus didn’t write us a book to read; he scribbled on a ground that we can’t access, and even if we could, the jottings would have long ago disappeared. What that means is that if we are going to base our ethics in part on Jesus’s doodling, then we should be prepared to do some doodling ourselves. We should study how Jesus doodles and then imagine how we might keep his doodling going. Christian ethics are all about doodling in this way. To be a disciple of Jesus requires us to get something of Jesus’s style in our own bodies, to embody and doodle the kingdom in a way that evokes his own dancing finger.
