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?