Eating With Sinners

A recent incident has spurred a national conversation about the nature of justice, although it’s not clear to me that everyone understands that this is the subject matter of the discussion.

At around 8 p.m. on June 22, 2018, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders walked into a small farm-to-table restaurant called the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia, to have dinner. She was accompanied by her husband and some others. At first the staff treated her as they would any other guest, taking her order and bringing the cheese boards that the table requested. But the chef phoned the owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, to tell her that the staff had expressed concerns.

Ms. Wilkinson went to the restaurant, confirmed that the patron was indeed Ms. Sanders, and conferred with her staff. Based on their input and her own thinking, she took Ms. Sanders aside and quietly asked her to leave. Ms. Sanders and her party did so without incident, although she subsequently tweeted out a complaint about the restaurant’s treatment of her.

Ms. Wilkinson and her employees were distressed by the administration’s policies toward transgender persons and immigrant families. (Full disclosure: I share that distress and have publicly expressed it.) She felt that her restaurant represented certain standards, like “honesty, compassion, and cooperation.” And she believed that serving Ms. Sanders would have been inconsistent with maintaining those standards.

People have disagreed about Ms. Wilkinson’s decision—and even how to think about it. I believe that this relatively minor incident actually provides wonderful fodder for contemplation and discussion and I will offer here a few thoughts of my own, for what they’re worth. But let me begin with a spoiler alert: what I have to say will probably not make anyone on either side of the debate particularly happy.

Let’s start by clearing the table, as it were, of arguments that may have some resonance but that I think do not hold up on even superficial scrutiny.

Some defenders of Ms. Sanders have suggested that it was wrong to ask her to leave for the same reason it was wrong to refuse service to blacks at lunch counters under segregation. But the restaurant did not ask Ms. Sanders to leave because of her identity—because of her race or her gender or her religion. It asked her to leave because of her conduct—because of her role as an apologist for policies that the owner and her staff find morally obnoxious. This is an important distinction both legally and morally.

On the other side of the equation, some defenders of Ms. Wilkinson have pointed out that she has the legal right to ask anyone she wants to leave her place of business (provided it is not on a prohibited identity basis, like race). This may be true as a proposition of law. But it does not answer the question of whether the decision was morally just. In the same vein, the question of whether the owner of the Masterpiece Cake Shop has the legal right to refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple is distinct from the question of whether he should do so as a normative matter.

The law will not answer the question before us, or, perhaps, even help us answer it. No, here we have here a question that we must answer by reference to normative concepts and, particularly, our notion of justice.

Many supporters of Ms. Wilkinson defend her decision by relying on a model of retributive justice. They may not expressly frame it that way—and she certainly did not—but I think it’s pretty clear that this is what it is. The argument goes like this: “you support policies that do not treat people inclusively and with compassion, and so we will treat you the same way.”

Calling this viewpoint “retributive” may make some people squirm, but let’s be honest—that’s what it is and that’s what was going on here. Ms. Sanders was being punished. She was not being permitted to finish her dinner in peace with her family and friends, just as anyone else would be allowed to do.

Calling this approach “retributive” may make us uneasy, but it’s important to recognize that this concept of justice has strong claims in logic and fairness. After all, for the “retribution” to be “justice” it must be proportional. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” has a symmetry to it that is normatively compelling; indeed, this Old Testament injunction served as a limiting principle, as a rule to prevent people from taking retribution that was not just because it was disproportional.

Defenders of Ms. Wilkinson’s decision might argue that, as retributive justice goes, Ms. Sanders got off with a pretty light sentence. They might contend that a refusal to allow you to move on from the cheese board to the chicken course is a slap on the wrist for someone who has excused and promoted policies that have inflicted terrible suffering on countless people. For those who take that view of Ms. Sanders and the policies she defends, this argument may have some merit. But it does not solve one problem: the model of justice it applies is still one of retributive justice.

In the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus quite explicitly rejected this model. He declared: “You have heard it said ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ but I say to you, don’t resist evil, turn the other cheek …. whoever asks you to go a mile for him, go two.” In other words, Jesus tells us that the proportionality of retributive justice does not go far enough for God, who calls us to show forgiveness and love.

The New Testament reaffirms over and over again that Jesus meant what he said here. Jesus himself dined with sinners and, as far as we know, did not ask them to leave after the cheese course. He did not even dismiss Judas Iscariot from his table—although He knew he would betray Him and offer Him up for the horrors of crucifixion.

And consider Saul of Tarsus, the dedicated Roman persecutor of the Christians. Retributive justice called for him to be treated exactly as he treated his victims, which would have been mighty brutal. Instead, God acted on Saul’s heart on the road to Damascus and this stunning act of light and love transformed him into the Apostle Paul.

Jesus’s command here is hard stuff, and not just because it is personally challenging, although I suspect that every last one of us finds it so. Rather, it is particularly hard because it assumes the presence of a human conscience that love can act upon. I recall, many years ago, sitting in a class with a famed theologian who said that Gandhi’s peaceful resistance ultimately worked with the British because they could be shamed into honoring it—but that a similar strategy would not have worked with other regimes. This, he declared, is what moved a pacifist like Dietrich Bonhoeffer to become Hitler’s would-be assassin.

I suspect that many defenders of Ms. Wilkinson would suggest that this is what we have in Sarah Huckabee Sanders: a person who is incapable of shame and immune to appeals of conscience. She’s the sort of person to whom we must apply the rules of retributive justice, the argument goes, because nothing else has any hope of making a difference. She’s beyond redemption.

For my own part, I have to believe that a God who can act upon the heart of Saul of Tarsus can do the same with Sarah Huckabee Sanders. And, for that matter, even with me. I try really hard to be slow to declare anyone past the point of God’s redeeming influence. Those are my marching orders.

And yet, at the same time, I cannot bring myself to judge the owner of the Red Hen restaurant or her staff. I can imagine their pain and, indeed, share in it. Plus, being slow to judge others is one of my marching orders, too. And, as I suggest above, retributive justice has its own claims on logic and proportionality. It’s just that I can’t find anywhere in the Beatitudes where Jesus talks about how blessed the logical and the proportional are.

I am struck by the fact that Ms. Wilkinson invoked the value of “compassion” in her remarks. I might respectfully suggest that she give some additional thought to the relationship between compassion and retribution. She might find that it’s more complicated than she thinks.

And I am struck by the fact that, in 2016, Donald Trump declared that his favorite Bible verse was “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” I might respectfully suggest that he should keep reading. He might find that there are even better verses to follow.    

Shameless

The story of “the woman taken in adultery” is surely among the most quoted, discussed, and debated in the gospels.

This may be surprising given the limited nature of the text. The story appears only in the Gospel of John. It occupies less than a dozen verses. And its basic plot line seems pretty straightforward.

The familiar story goes like this:

While Jesus was teaching at the temple, a group of scribes and Pharisees brought a woman before him who had been “caught in the very act” of committing adultery. Testing Jesus—as the scribes and Pharisees were prone to do—they pointed out that Mosaic law commanded them to stone her to death. They asked what Jesus had to say about that.

Of course, these men had less interest in knowing his answer than in putting Jesus in an impossible situation. If he said that they shouldn’t stone her, then he’d speak in violation of the law of Moses. But if he said they should, then he’d condemn the poor woman to a horrible, violent death. They must have thought they’d set a pretty good trap for him.

But if the gospels tell us anything, they tell us that trapping Jesus usually proved difficult. In the end, it proved impossible. Over and over again, the gospels reassure us that we are free in the love of God, no matter how thoroughly circumstances may seem to have cornered us. So Jesus slipped this trap, just as he did so many others.

Rather than saying “free her” or “stone her,” he responded by pausing to write something with his finger in the dust. Then he declared (in the majestic poetry of the King James version): “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” In a famous film version of the episode, Jesus literally takes a stone from the ground, approaches various men in the mob, and offers it to them. Each man recoils at the idea that he would presume to call himself sinless.

Jesus then returned to writing on the ground and gradually the woman’s accusers drifted away, the eldest leaving first. Now alone with the woman, Jesus asked who condemned her and she said: “No one.” Jesus responded: “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”

This brief story is fabulously rich and invites endless questions. Some questions focus on Jesus. Why did he write on the ground? What did he write? The names of the men? Their sins?

Other questions focus on the woman: Who was she? Was she a prostitute—or just an ordinary woman caught in an affair? Was she, perhaps, Mary Magdalene?

If the woman was indeed Mary Magdalene, as church tradition suggests, then the story gives us two heroes: Jesus, who defended and forgave her; and Mary, who went on to become one of his most devoted followers.

In a narrative with two heroes it becomes easy to find villains, and we have a gang of them—the scribes and Pharisees who wanted to kill her. Indeed, in a lifetime of hearing numerous sermons on this story, I’ve never once heard anyone say a good or redeeming thing about these men. They arrived in a blood rage; Jesus confronted them with their hypocrisy; and they slithered off into obscurity.

Don’t miss the irony at work here. We read the story; we shake our heads over the sinfulness of this gang; and we condemn them for it. What do we want for Christmas? Just a Pharisee and a scribe and a good rock to throw at them. You see the problem.

Perhaps it’s the lawyer in me, but I want to push the defense of these men even a bit further. And I want to do so by emphasizing the kind of story that John has not given us here. This matters because we could easily stumble into misunderstanding why the narrative plays out as it does.

Bear in mind that, of all the gospels, John’s puts the power and authority of Jesus on fullest display. As one commentator observes, in John’s gospel “Jesus is in control.” Indeed, in this gospel’s rendition of the Passion, Jesus does not suffer.

We therefore might expect this story to turn on some preternatural gift that Jesus possesses and puts to use. We see this notion reflected in theory that Jesus had a mystical knowledge of the sins of the men and wrote them out for all to see. Reasonable minds can, of course, disagree about how to understand the passage. But I worry that this interpretation makes the story turn on a kind of mind-reading magic trick that deprives the narrative of its psychological power—and perhaps even its moral instruction.

This is one reason I prefer Rene Girard’s theory that Jesus did not write in the dust in order to confront the men but, rather, to do the opposite. The act of writing, Girard argued, drew Jesus’s eyes down and avoided what the men would have taken as an accusatory gaze. Averting his eyes—while inviting the men to face their hypocrisy—lowered the temperature of an already heated situation.

No, I do not think that this story implicates any special powers of Jesus—although it may say a lot about his special wisdom and special insight. Unlike many other passages where Jesus saves a life, I believe that this one does not depend on a miracle. Rather, it revolves around Jesus allowing the men to find their own way toward the answer. And here’s my principal point—it also depends on the men hearing, understanding, and embracing the message Jesus had conveyed.

This story therefore turns out to have a third, and wholly unexpected, set of heroes: the men who had the capacity to listen, learn, and change. This story could have played out very differently with different men, the sort of men who would shrug off Jesus’s point, grab a rock, and proceed to “follow the law.” Indeed, after Jesus makes his statement there is a moment of extraordinary dramatic tension when we can imagine a voice rising up from the back and yelling “stone her!”—just as voices will later rise up from the back and yell “crucify him!”

What made it possible for these men, these anti-heroic heroes, to respond as they did? I think it was their capacity for shame. The word “shame” has fallen out of fashion and into disuse recently, and for understandable reasons. Indeed, the “shaming” of others is, in a sense, precisely what Jesus condemns in this story.

But maybe, in our unease with the misuses of shame, we have lost a valuable idea along the way. Although the origins of the word “shame” are apparently obscure, there is some thought that it may have derived from an old Germanic word that suggests a covering from nakedness. When self-directed, shame becomes the moral force that takes hold when we stand naked before our fellow human beings, fully exposed for who we are. To lose our capacity for shame is therefore to conspire with falsehood—to dissemble, to pretend we’re something we’re not, to hide our true selves behind whatever camouflage conveniently serves our interests and situation.

To have hurled a stone would have been not just an act of violence, but an act of shameless violence. Cruelty in the guise of law. Obscenity in the name of holiness.

This may explain why the eldest among the men left first. Their time on earth had made them fully aware of their own shortcomings. They had lived long enough to see the evil that shamelessness can do. They had grown sick and weary of seeing the innocent suffer at its hands.

            And so I ask: who—in the name of law and righteousness and in our shamelessness—will we gather together to berate and to stone today?