We are so used to thinking of Jesus as a divinity whom we accept or reject on the basis of faith
that we are apt to miss a far more relevant detail: that he was an extremely acute philosopher,
whose rules on human conduct maintain a deep and ongoing applicability. One of the most
salient of his lessons comes in chapter eight of the Gospel of Saint John. Jesus has recently
come down from Galilee to Jerusalem when some Pharisees, members of a sect focused on precise
adherence to Jewish tradition and law, present him with a married woman whom they have caught
having sex with someone other than her husband. ‘Teacher,’ they ask him, ‘this woman
was caught in the very act of committing adultery. In our law, Moses commanded that such a woman
must be stoned to death. Now what do you say?’ Jesus is being edged into a trap. Will he
say that it's completely fine to have an affiar? Or will the mild mannered preacher
of love and forgiveness turn out to be just as strict about legal matters as the Jewish
authorities he liked to criticise? Jesus makes a deft move. He doesn’t categorically deny
the mob the right to stone the woman to death – but he adds one apparently small but in
practice epochal caveat to this right. They can kill and destroy her to their hearts content
if, but only if, they can be absolutely sure that they have first satisfied one crucial
criteria: they have never done anything wrong themselves.
Importantly, by this Jesus doesn’t mean if they have never slept around outside of
their marriage, he means if they have never done anything wrong at all, whatsoever, across
any area of their lives. Only absolute moral purity grants us the right to be vicious,
high-handed and unsparing towards transgressors. An important principle of ethics is being
introduced: we are to be counted as properly innocent not when we are blameless in this
or that area, but when we have done nothing wrong whatsoever, at any point and in any
Jesus responds to the Pharisees with what have become immortal
words: ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone…’ The mob, understanding
the rebuke, put down their projectiles and the terrified woman is spared. The real target
of this story is a perennial problem in the human soul: self-righteousness. Self-righteousness
is the degenerate outgrowth of something otherwise extremely valuable: a desire to be in the
right. The problem is that being in the right in some areas has a fateful tendency to lead
us to see ourselves as morally blameless across our entire lives and therefore encourages
a particular mean-spiritedness and inhumanity towards those who transgress in situations where we have been good
Jesus’s
point is that the surest way to be kind is not to take pride in never having done a particular
species of wrong. It lies in seeing that, inevitably, we too have been foolish and cruel
at other moments, and in using that knowledge to foster compassion towards those whom it
lies in our powers to ‘stone’. A world in which we keep our own wrongs firmly in
mind becomes, paradoxically, a properly virtuous and humane place.
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