Laying down the stones
Childhood taught me to hate myself. It was a happenstance intersection of scared little kids who picked on me at school—hate always has fear as its foundation—and a family tragedy which had primed me into an unhealthy enslavement to doing the right thing. Nobody's fault, really; just life. Sometimes this stuff runs off like water from a duck's back. And sometimes it shapes a life like mine so that I periodically spiral down into destructive self-hatred. I can't enjoy myself, not for long. I am compelled to find a way to be a victim. I am like the man from country of the Gerasenes, bruising himself with stones.
He is a scapegoat. The community blames him for their problems and drives him out. Yet, paradoxically, it values him. It wants him close at hand. So it chains him up. The good news is that even then, he can break the chains. They don't quite own him even though their fear and hatred has so infiltrated his soul that he believes them, he believes he is hateful, and stones himself. (Luke 5:1-20 et al) Like him, I struggle to hold on to the idea that I am loved and valued by God.
They came to the other side of the lake, to the country of the Gerasenes 2And when he had stepped out of the boat, immediately a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit met him. 3He lived among the tombs; and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain; 4for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. 5Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones.
The end of self-hatred is death. Those who scapegoat us, who project their fears upon us, are symbolically acting out the deeds of a lynch mob. Mostly, the mob only symbolically kills the victim—not always—but death is always behind the shunning, the teasing, the ostracism, and the making of the outsider. And the outsider—the cast-out one—knows, even if they are not fully conscious, the threat of death is there. Why are we afraid of the bullies? Because we know, very well, that they can kill us. That is deeply, evolutionarily ingrained in us, even though we may not be conscious of it.
So… if you are like me, the spiralling down into self-hatred is the living out of that threat. The threat compounds. Self destruction beckons. If I kill myself, then I will get my own back, because then I will hurt them; in some way I will kill them back. Or perhaps it is simply that it is too hard to go on. If I kill myself, I will be free of it. Free of them, and free of the self hatred which still bruises me—some of those people who injured me are dead, for goodness sake!
But mostly, in order to remain alive, because we are primed to survive at any cost by our evolutionary past, we ourselves join a group of scapegoaters. We survive by joining another group, a community, a sports club, even a church. And all human groups tend cluster around an enemy. "We are not like them. We are better." The enemy unites us. Even churches are infected by this.
How do we find a healthy church? How do we critique ourselves as a church? Anyone can claim the name of Jesus. Is there another way?
Who are our enemies? Who do we know to be wrong? Who does our community hate? Wherever we mark ourselves off, identify ourselves by being right compared to others who are wrong, we have joined a group of scapegoaters. We have become sub-Christian. Our faith has been subverted. We have lost sight of something about Jesus.
Jesus did not have enemies. To be sure, people feared and therefore hated Jesus. But he did not measure himself or identify himself by enemies.
Look at another story of stoning. We call this one The Story of the Woman Caught in Adultery. (John 7:57-8:11)
7: 53Then each of them went home, 8:1while Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them. 3The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, 4they said to him, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. 5Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?’ 6They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’ 8And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. [Other ancient authorities add the sins of each of them ] 9When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. 10Jesus straightened up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ 11She said, ‘No one, sir.’ [κύριε.] And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.’
This story has nothing to do with adultery. The mob does not care about it, or they would have brought the man as well. All they are interested in is neutralising Jesus' influence, defeating him. And that has death at the back of it as well. The woman is merely collateral damage. She is a means to an end. Does our faith treat people as means to an end? If it does, every time we do that, we have joined a group of scapegoaters. We have become sub-Christian. Our faith has been subverted. We have lost sight of something about Jesus.
iThey set a trap for Jesus. If he says that the woman should be stoned, then it is likely he will be in trouble with the Roman authorities—we can assume someone will make sure to tell those authorities that Jesus, only Jesus, instigated the lynch mob—because only the Romans could issue a death sentence. Besides, as Rene Girardii says, to order her to be stoned would be contradict his own principles. But if he does not agree with them stoning her, then they will say he does not obey the law of Moses. They have already just said there is no prophet will arise from Galileeiii, and here, they will say, Jesus has just proved this, because he has contradicted the law.
The song says money makes the world go round. (Cabaretiv) But money only makes the world go around because it can buy death. It is the power to kill that drives our world. They want to kill him, figuratively or, if need-be, actually. What power can Jesus have against them?
We are intrigued by his writing on the ground. There is no consensus in our time about what he was doing, what the act symbolised. Some very early scribes thought he was writing a list of the sins of the accusers on the ground, a list they could all read. And where verse 8 says And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground, they added to their copies of those texts: the sins of each of them.
Me? I think he was buying time. I think he was working out what to do, how to act in this high stakes moment where death was a breath away, only one stone's throw awayv. Just one stone needed to be thrown and the disruption and division in the community caused by Jesus would be solved. Death would flow, and everyone would be in solidarity again. He was deciding to be Jesus who shows us God rather than simply one more of us.
So what happens? I always imagined three groups. In that imagination, there is the lynch mob, that particular group of scribes and pharisees—not all scribes and pharisees hated Jesus, some agreed with him: read the previous chapter—the first group was that particular frightened group and their fear-filled followers, then there was the group which is the woman, and then there was Jesus.
But when Jesus stands up, he steps over to the woman. He stands with her. He places the choice to be human, or not, in the mob's hands, along with the stones. And he bent down again, making himself totally vulnerable to the mobvi. If they kill her, they will kill him, because it is he who is the real target, the one they want gone. He chooses the woman, not the solidarity of the mob. He offers his life instead of keeping himself alive by joining a community that hates; that is, that is driven by fear. He refuses to sacrifice her to his desire to stay alive. He offers himself and shows us we can live without sacrificing others to deal with our fear of death.
That is his power. And somewhere in the mob, one person, just one, just one, sees that they have no right to kill. They see Jesus offers another way to live and to be human. They have been touched by the gentleness of God. They have seen. They have seen that God desires mercy, not sacrifice. That there is no hatred, and no fear, in God. And that one walks away. And then another. The oldest first; the ones who have begun to make their peace with death. And the younger ones see a different way to live, a way without violence, without killing. And on this day they walk away from death.
We can only defeat death by offering ourselves. And that offering always risks the fact that someone may throw the first stone. I lie in bed after 36 hours slow spiralling into despair and self hatred, considering suicide. My partner rubs my back and tells me I am not worthless and that people love me and like me. And that risks me lashing out at them. All self giving risks this. And yet that self giving, that offer of vulnerability, that sharing of the danger of death… that heals.
‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ 11She said, ‘No one, Lord.’ [κύριε]
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.
But if I go and do not give of myself, if I continue to practise the community of exclusion, I will stay under the power of death. It will own me. I will heap stones upon myself, and, inevitably, even if only symbolically, be throwing them at others.
Andrea Prior (June 2023)
i For one thing, they lie. The law does not say we should stone such women, just by the way. It says, "22If a man is caught lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman as well as the woman. " Deut 22:22
ii Rene Girard Casting the First Stone https://mimetictheory.com/articles/casting-the-first-stone-by-rene-girard
iii Cf. John 7:52 They replied, ‘Surely you are not also from Galilee, are you? Search and you will see that no prophet is to arise from Galilee.’
iv https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/5858329/Liza+Minnelli/Money%2C+Money
v Brown mentions "the Semitic custom of doodling on the ground while distraught" The Gospel According to John Vol 1, pp334
vi Girard (ibid) says that to look at the mob could prove to be a provocation. Having been in a similar situation, I am inclined to agree.
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