WRITING IN THE DIRT

John 8 is as well-known a passage as it is disputed.  It is not in the oldest manuscripts, yet it has stood the test of time.  Several themes weave through it, so that it is included in most translations.  It provides a great viewpoint on the Law and the new covenant.
  It begins in 8.1 where Jesus goes to the Mount of Olives, where He often prayed.  He spent the night there.  His frequent practice was to pray in the night, so He may have done so here.  Early the next morning He comes back to Jerusalem, toward the temple followed by a crowd to hear Him teach.
  At the temple, the scribes and Pharisees are dragging a woman caught in adultery out to a dirt space on the temple grounds.  They bring her to Jesus saying, Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act, 8.4.  They remind Jesus the Law says punishment for adultery is stoning, What do you say?  They were testing Him.
  John uses three words meaning, 'going down'--
  katw--from kuptw, to bend down
  kategraphen--to write down
Jesus is going down and down to write on the ground, He is going down to her level as an adulterer.  But then in the next verse He uses the prefix for 'up', ana--
anekupsen--stand up
anamarthtos--without sin
  Now He stands up, saying--The one who iswithout sin throw the first stone, 8.7.  Here He takes the scribes and Pharisees back to Deuteronomy17.5, 7 where God gave Israel permission to stone the one caught in adultery.  But notice 17.7 which says, The hand of witnesses shall be first against him.  That God sanctioned stoning to purge Israel of the sin of adultery meant the witness and the peoplewho stoned the adulterer were not guilty of murder,they were obeying God.
  But that was the old covenant with God; here when Jesus says, The one who is without sin..He is saying they cannot stone her without committing sin.  Jesus is accusing them of playing God, Matt. 7.5.  He may be intimatig they have committed sin with her, which is how they are witnesses, Matt. 23.27.  That may explain what He wrote, Gen. 38.20-23.
  As they cannot stone her without sinning themselves, right there they leave, one by one.  Now Jesus is left with the woman.  John returns to a word using kata, or 'going down. again--
kateleiphthn--left alone
but then He immediately uses in 8.10 the prefix, ana, meaning 'go up'--
anakupsas--he stood up
Jesus has gone down and down to her level,writing in the sand.  She is dust and to dust she will return, if Jesus had not stooped down to save her from stoning.  Now He lifts her up.  He stands first so that she can, since He is, the first born of many brethren, Romans 8.29.
  We can notice these two words, kata and ana.  Katw is used in 8.6 to mean stoop down, but it is also used in Matt. 27.5 at the time when Jesus died.  The veil of the temple is torn from 'top to bottom'--anwthen ews katw.  Here in John 8 Jesus pulls the curtain open for the woman to see Jesus as God, as He has not come to condemn her but to save her.
  The next day Jesus returns.  Now in the temple, He sits down to teach.  In John 8.23 Jesus uses both words, katw and ana when He says,
You are from below (katw) I am from above (anw), you are of this world, I am not of this world.

When Jesus came to be baptized by John, who said, Behold the Lamb of God, John said, I have beheld the Spirit descending (katabainon) as a dove, John 1.32.
  In John 1.51 Jesus is calling His disciples.  Philip calls Nathaniel to come to Jesus.  When he does, Nathaniel witnesses to Jesus standing there by saying, You are the Son of God, you are the king of Israel.  It's a pretty amazing thing to say upon seeing someone for the first time.  So Jesus says to Nathaniel, You shall see the heavens opened up and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.
  The word 'ascending' is anabainontes,the word descending is katabainontes.  Here we have our two prefixes,ana and katw.  In Genesis 28.11 Jacob has a dream in which he sees, a ladder was set on the earth with its top reaching to heaven,with the angels ascending and descending on it.  The place where this happened is called in Hebrew, the place, and Jacob translated into Greek is Jesus.
  In John 6.51 when the disciples cannot accept what Jesus said about Himself as bread and wine, He says, Does this cause you to stumble? What then if you behold the Son of Manascending where He was before?
  Evidently when someone believes that Jesus is sent from the Father to redeem men and women, they are given a glimpse of the heavenly relationship of Son to Father.  The invisibility of God is peeled back so that Jacob and Nathaniel could see the ascending and descending.  That Jesus descended so that we might ascend is revealed to Paul, for him to write in Ephesians 2.6 that, we were raised up with Him and seated in the heavenly places in Christ.