Neither do I condemn you

A word for the week

We know something about public shaming now that maybe we had forgotten for a while. The pile-on, the crowd that gathers to watch someone get destroyed, the ugly pleasure of having a clear villain to condemn. It is an old human appetite, and it is exactly the appetite Jesus walks into and defuses in this story, one of the most famous scenes in all the Gospels, and among the most quietly devastating.

The religious leaders drag a woman before Jesus, caught in adultery, in the very act, they say, which raises a question they conveniently do not answer, namely where the man is, since it takes two. But she is the one they have, and they set her in the middle, exposed, humiliated, and they turn to Jesus with a trap. The law of Moses says to stone such a woman, they say. What do you say? It is a trap because if he says stone her, he betrays his whole message of mercy; and if he says let her go, they can accuse him of throwing out the law. And the woman stands there in the middle of it, a human being reduced to bait in someone else's argument.

And Jesus does something strange. He bends down and writes in the dirt with his finger. We do not know what he wrote; the story does not say, and people have guessed for centuries. But the gesture itself does something: it slows everything down, it takes the heat out of the mob, it refuses to play their game at their speed. They keep pressing him, and finally he straightens up and says the sentence that has echoed ever since: let the one among you who is without sin throw the first stone at her. And then he bends back down and writes again, and waits.

And it works, not by argument but by turning each accuser's eyes onto himself. One by one, beginning with the oldest, who perhaps had the longest list, they drift away, until the whole mob has silently dissolved, and Jesus is left alone with the woman. Notice what dispersed them. Not a lecture on mercy. Just being made to remember, each one, that he too had a stone-worthy thing in his own past. You cannot enjoy destroying a sinner once you have honestly remembered that you are one.

Then the tender heart of it. Jesus straightens up and, for the first time, speaks to the woman as a person and not an exhibit. Where are your accusers, he asks; has no one condemned you? No one, Lord, she says. And Jesus says: neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more. Hold both halves of that, because the whole gospel is in the balance of it. Neither do I condemn you, the mercy, full and free, no stone thrown, no shaming. And, go and sin no more, the call to a new life, spoken not as a threat but as a door held open. He does not excuse what she did; he tells her to leave it behind. But he refuses to define her by it, or to let anyone stone her for it.

That is how he treats every one of us, the one caught and the ones holding stones alike. To the caught: I do not condemn you; now go and live differently. To the crowd: you who are without sin, throw first, and watch your hand fall. Drop the stone. You were never as far above the person in the middle as the crowd wanted you to believe.