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Stone Throwing: On Rightness, Not Righteousness

Stone Throwing: On Rightness, Not Righteousness

Last updated on: July 28, 2016 at 9:26 pm by Kerry Connelly

Stone Throwing: On Rightness, Not Righteousness 2016-07-28T21:26:29-04:00 Kerry Connelly

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Jesus can be so weird.

So wonderfully, amazingly weird. And every time I read the Bible, I get a new sense of wonder, because new God-thoughts smack me upside the head with a thunk.

It happened just the other day, as I was reading, once again, the “Let he who has no sin cast the first stone” story. It’s one of my favorites in the Bible, and it’s one of the stories that makes me fall mad in love with Jesus. He’s the epitome of a hero in this passage, in a way that maybe only women can understand.

Okay, maybe only women who have a little bit of a past.

There’s so much about God’s grace in this story. Here is the shamed woman-with-a-past. Here is the ugly mob — the proverbial bad guy. And here is the super-human, the God-man, the unlikely and unrecognized hero who is a little strange, what with all his sand-writing, here to save her. It’s got all the narrative plot-points that make a story good. And the lesson here is so obvious — don’t judge, lest you be judged.

Jesus, my hero.

But upon deeper inspection, some interesting things come to light. Like the fact that it was all a set up.

The woman was hauled in front of Jesus because she was caught in the act of adultery. By definition, she had to have a partner, but the man was no where to be found. And the story is one of my favorites because of the way that Jesus subverts this hypocrisy and sexism, by not condemning the woman.

Again: Jesus. My hero.

And the footnotes in my Bible have some interesting things to say. Eugene Peterson tells us that the teachers of the law were trying to trap Jesus. Jews were not allowed to carry out death sentences under Roman law, so if he’d encouraged her stoning, he’d be in trouble with the government. If he said to set her free, they could accuse him of not supporting God’s law. Tricky. And Jesus turns it all around on them by asking them to consider their own sin first.

Oh, Jesus, how I love you. If you were anyone else, I’d rub my hands together gleefully and say, “Evil genius.” But, well, you know. That doesn’t really apply here.

Anyway, in reading the footnotes I was struck by something else — the teachers of the law were mostly self-appointed authorities, sociological boss-men on account of their training and knowledge, not so much because of their God-wisdom. And there’s a really big difference between the two.

Training and knowledge can give us a false sense of security in our own selves — in rightness instead of righteousness. When we rest in what we know, it cuts us off from the wide open spaces where things unknown to us like to play. And those unknown things can seem pretty dark and scary, threatening to the status quo, subversive in their very nature to our own power and control.

And I don’t know about you, but when I feel threatened, I get pissed.

Wisdom, on the other hand, is an open palm, held up in surrender and release. It’s a hand open to self-examination, each tiny line and crevice laid out for inspection. Wisdom is not knuckled-topped fists, closed up to God’s grace and understanding.

Eugene Peterson’s footnotes tell us that the authority of the legal teachers was self-appointed, not God-official, and that they often considered their interpretations of the law and their regulations to be virtually as authoritative as scripture.

Rightness, not righteousness.

But here is the thing that smacked me upside the head about this particular passage as I read it again — here is the really big thing: There is the woman, shamed. There is Jesus, forgiving her. There is grace and more grace here in this story.

And especially for the hypocritical teachers. For the bad guys in the story. There is grace there for them, too.

I just did some quick research a’ la Google on death by stoning, and it’s pretty fucking horrific. I don’t suggest you recreate my search, lest you want to be quite disturbed. The violence we humans are capable of is mind-blowing. The organized violence as a group activity — “Oh, let’s stop by that stoning in the square on our way to the market,” — is even worse.

The pictures I saw usually included all of the same elements: one person, usually a woman, buried in the ground with her arms tied against her body. A crowd — usually all men — surrounding her, stones in fists, angry rightness on their faces.

The after pictures are worse. I won’t describe.

Everything about these pictures is disturbing, including the fact that an entire crowd of people lost a huge chunk of their humanity in those moments for the sake of their rightness. Because how can you participate in the murder of another human being and not lose a piece of your own soul? With every stone they threw, they tossed away a part of themselves, gave it over to evil, to darkness, to their own sense of authority, control, and legalism.

So whether they knew it or not, Jesus was just as much a hero to the mob of angry men that day, for saving a piece of their souls. Grace and more grace to the bad guys, because it can’t be good to be a stone-thrower.

I’ve been a stone-thrower. My target these days is Donald Drumpf, the religious right. In my quiet alone moments, it’s the friends who left me, the family who failed me, leaders who hurt me, the aspects of myself that don’t measure up. It’s not very fun, this throwing of stones.

I want to open my hands, let the stones fall to the ground. With each quiet thud, let them kick up a small storm of forgiveness and grace, sands of my sins that will blow far away into that blessed sea of forgetfulness, and let me breathe again.

And let you breathe again — all of you who are, who have been, the targets of my stones. Let me lay down these stones and gather the pieces of my soul back to me through my hero, Jesus, who draws in the sand the map, perhaps, to help me find them. My soul pieces.

And let you find your soul pieces, too, in your forgiveness of me. God knows, I need all the sand-storms I can get, all the finger-painted maps in the sand, to help me find my way back to you — all the people I’ve hurt. I have a trunk full of stolen soul pieces of my very own, for all the reasons I’ve given you to throw some stones.

Let Jesus come between us, let him kick up some cleansing sand. Let’s all put down our stones together.

On the count of three….

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