It’s hard to know what to write
And would it matter if I did?
There’s little use in visionaries
With eyes clenched shut
Or for scribes who study not
What they scratch with their quills
If you could read, would you say
This book does not open to you?
If you could not, would you tell me
You do not want to listen?
Yet the time is nigh in this broad darkness
I have seen it plain as day
When those who play at being deaf
Will hear indictment writ in dust
For nothing speaks louder than silent shame
And there’s dirt enough to go ’round
Those who lift stones find their hands
Turned against themselves
Those who play judge and jury slink away
At loss for word and wit
This is the day when the wise understand
When the learned get schooled by the Master
Gosh, this was a hard one to write. The apocryphal passage in John 8 about Jesus and the adulteress is one of the most celebrated in Scripture, and it’s quite short. Mining it for something new to say is, shall we say, a battle of words and wits.
One thing leapt out at me, though… after about my twelfth time through it over three weeks. The Scripture says, rather obliquely, that the crowd “heard” what Jesus wrote in the dust. An interesting idea. And when I ran across similar language in the second half of Isaiah 29, I almost completely threw out my previous three attempts and re-wrote from the ground up.
So in this final stab at the passage, Peter gets some insight into how the Kingdom of God is immanent.