I’d like to look at the New Testament story about the woman taken in adultery. The first thing to notice about the woman was that she was engaging in what we could call a “high risk” behavior. I imagine that at some point she had witnessed the raw justice that she was now facing. She “knew the score”. But what would motivate her to take this risk? In her risk benefit analysis what was the benefit she was after? What was she searching for?
Looking at this story from the 50,000 ft level there is a bit of a recurring theme: the woman is taken in “sin” of adultery, Jesus says, “he that is without “sin” let him cast the first stone” and at the end Jesus tells the woman to “go and sin no more”. Sin keeps floating to the surface throughout this story.
Now sin is an “onion word” it has layers of meaning and I’d like to look at two of them:
At the surface level sin is about rules of behavior – “Thou shall not do this / Thou shall not do that”. This is our immediate sense of sin. Sin in this essence then has to do with “rules of engagement”. In a religious society the rules would have their justification in the notion of the will of God, in a secular society, like ours, in some notion of the “common good” These rules function as ‘ideologies of stability’ in a particular culture.
At a deeper level, one of the Greek words that the New Testament uses for sin comes from the world of archery (bows and arrows). To sin, in archery, means to miss the target, to miss the mark. Saint Paul alludes to this when he says that “we have all sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God”. We have fallen short of what we were aiming at.
The Jewish (Talmud) uses an agricultural metaphor for what we should be aiming at. The metaphor is about the spacing of trees in an olive orchard. If the trees are planted too close together, they will grow in each other’s shadow, if they are too far apart, they lose the advantage of the micro-climate of the orchard. The proper spacing allows them to grow to the “full measure and stature” of what they can be and to bear much fruit. Could it be that the desire of the woman was to have the topography of her life arranged such that she could grow into the ”full measure and stature” of all that she could be? Was she on a quest for fulfillment (Salvation)?
The story is quite up front about the fact that this bit of “street theatre”, with the woman, was purposely “setup” by the religious leaders to “test” Jesus. They are saying to the woman, “Look, given your behavior, the rules of engagement are 'quite' clear and that for the sake of the greater GOOD of the ‘all’ we have to do something BAD to ‘you’". Let’s call this “Dangerous Goodness”.
Their rationale would be something like, “If we let her away with this and it gets around. All Hell could break loose! Before you know it, everyone will be shagging on the street corners!” This is their “ideology of stability” talking.
Now it’s interesting to note that there is a major character in this story that is never mentioned. There is an 800 lb. gorilla sitting in the corner of this story. The woman didn’t commit adultery all by herself. Where is the guy, her co-adulterer? She is being made to take the “fall” for the whole episode. She is being made to bear the sin and shame of this episode all by herself. She is being “scapegoated”.
The scapegoating mechanism is really good at turning the spotlight up to full intensity on the scapegoat while letting the more serious perpetrators hide in the shadows. This is certainly the case in this story. If the unnamed fellow was in on the “setup” then presumably he’s also told a few lies. He then, has arithmetically more transgressions on his score card.
Cultural anthropologist, Rene Girard, makes the interesting observation that all societies, whether ancient or modern, keep an inventory of people who are “type approved” for scapegoating. They are easy victims and based on the current “sensibilities” and power structures functioning within a society the scapegoat(s) could be singled out on the basis of gender, race, religion or some other characteristic.
If you have ever been “scapegoated” and have agonized over what you might have done to deserve “this level of grief or persecution?”, the answer is probably not that much and more than likely less than others in the situation. It’s just that you were the easiest target, you were the one chosen to be led, “as a sheep before her shearers”.
In the fifth century B.C. city of Pericles (Athens) they maintained the ancient practice of keeping a stable of prisoners as sacrificial victims for times of special crisis. The population, of the city, would sometimes be visited by a social virus that caused the ‘dis-ease’ that today we would call cabin fever. Once the “Hatfields and McCoys” (in fighting) type symptoms were observed, the rulers of the city would release a scapegoat to be abused by all the citizens and then executed. The word for such persons was pharmakos, derived from pharmakon, a word that can mean both poison and remedy (from which we get the term “pharmacy”).
This catharsis would calm the body politic down. The body and blood of the scapegoat was used to purchase the civic peace until the next variant of the social dis-ease arrived in town.
Note that the dosage was really important. A one milligram (one scapegoat) dose was all that was required. If 100 prisoners were released it would make the dis-ease worse. The body politic would suffer some injury and an overdose (1000 milligrams) of the pharmakos could be fatal! The single prisoner was allowed no weapon. He stood naked before the mob. It was never about a fair fight. It was only about his sacrificial death.
If dosage is important and a particular social group is chosen to be scapegoated, then that group must be a of a certain sized minority, something in the ‘fringe’ range. Whatever economic power and social weaponry, they possess must be taken from them. They must be rendered harmless. This is just part of their sacrificial preparation.
All the scapegoating elements are there in this New Testament story. The defenceless woman and the mob, high on the fumes from their narrative of them being on the right side of righteousness. The members of the mob were all juiced up and itching to score a goal for God!
The mob were possessed by this narrative and trying hard to get Jesus to join their brigade of the righteous. They were trying to evangelize Jesus into their mythology, but Jesus was not taking that bait.
Their myth was on life support from the beginning. Although it had some power it had no health and had to be maintained by brute force. It was fragile. If one of its members had said, of the woman, “That’s my buddy Fred’s sister, she’s no skank!”, he would immediately be spewed out of the mouth of the mob! The fragile cohesion of the narrative had to be maintained by all means possible. The mob were suffering from a group psychosis. Micromanaging their narrative was job #1.
Jesus is sandwiched between the mob and the woman. What does he do? In the King James version, of the Bible, it says that he behaved “as though he heard them not”. What he does do though, is stoop down and write something in the dust. I wonder what he writes. Some scholars think that he wrote the name of the High Priest Caiaphas, who was the ringleader of the mob. In Jewish literature there is the observation that if you write your name in the sand eventually the wind blows over it and your name just disappears. The message being that you are just not that important, in the bigger scheme of things.
Is Jesus signalling that this whole episode is just full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, and telegraphing to Caiaphas that his concerns are just ‘Dust in the Wind’?
Using a narrative overlay, what we have here is a pack of wolves, a little lamb (laying in the dust crying) and Jesus (the good Shepherd). Jesus stoops over and picks up one smooth stone, in the form of a verbal directive, and casts it at their narrative. “Let he that is without sin, let him cast the first stone!”. The honour of casting the ‘first stone’, at the woman, would belong to Caiaphas, the High Priest. Jesus’ words hit Caiaphas right in the face. It turns out that one who was really without sin, Jesus, casts the first stone but it was directed at the accusatory (Satanic) spirit that had possessed the mob.
In a kind of Jujitsu move Jesus redirects their energy back on themselves. Rather than judging the woman they are now put in the position of individually judging themselves. Their narrative, held aloft by their bravado, collapses. They all slink away, one by one.
Jesus and the woman are now alone. In practical terms Jesus has just diffused both the Weapon of Mass Psychosis, and the Weapon of Dangerous Goodness. Jesus then asks the woman, “Where are your accusers?” “They are gone” she says. “Neither do I condemn thee” says Jesus. And then he says, “Go and sin no more”. How could she now refuse the directive of the person who had just given her, her life back? In a way she had just been ‘born again’.
A few minutes before, she probably assumed that she was within seconds of “the hour of her death” when, in reality and unbeknown to her, she was within moments of “the hour of her salvation”. She didn’t know it, but she was about to meet the real “lover of her soul”. She had been ‘Lookin for Luv in all the Wrong Places’. I imagine that once she thought all this over, she could resonate with the psalmist where he says, of God, “even if I descend into the pit of hell, you are there!”
As far as dealing with “missing the mark”, there are two strategies we can employ: Caiaphas and his boys are personifications of an approach that sees things in terms of problems and solutions. The woman’s behaviour was deemed a “problem” and her death was the appropriate “solution”.
Jesus, in this case, however, employs a ‘predicament’ and ‘outcome’ approach. The woman had certainly got herself into a pickle of a predicament, but Jesus gives her the opportunity to manage the eventual ‘outcome’ of that predicament. This preserves her freedom and honours her dignity as a child of God.
Jesus gives us all some management control over the outcomes of our lives and ‘wait there’s more!’, He also gives us the gift of his Spirit to bolster our skill set. For you know – “Grace perfects nature”. So, going forward, like the woman, we need to be on guard against those who want to frame us, or our neighbours, within the scapegoating narrative of seeing us as just, ‘problems to be solved’.
Blog image - Photo taken by Jason Mrachina
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