Fred Sneesby - Observations on Culture, Faith and Politics

Stoning Women

March 26, 2007

I had written only half a column and I was already late. Usually, I try to get the weekly column out on the website on Friday night but I was way behind. Knowing that this had happened before (as my regular readers would also know), my youngest kept saying, “Dad, did you write your article?” She’s tough.

With time on Sunday, I figured I would complete it that day. But I went to church Sunday morning and, after hearing the Gospel reading, I said, “Whoa,” and decide to scrap the piece and finish it another week.

I said, “Whoa,” because the reading was the first eleven verses from the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John; that’s the passage about the authorities bringing the woman caught in adultery to Jesus to demand his opinion, an opinion they were hoping would set him at odds with cultural and religious authority. They knew very well that the accepted penalty for a woman caught in adultery was to stone her to death. You probably know the story. They got their wish, Jesus did respond. He took his time, though, taking some of the wind out of the self-righteous’ sails by bending down and writing absent-mindedly in the dirt. It doesn’t say what he wrote – I would love to know. Not to be sacrilegious, but it must have been something bordering on an expletive directed at that crowd. Anyway, he eventually straightened up and made one withering suggestion, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

No stones came flying (Yes, I do remember the old joke about one stone landing near Jesus’ feet and his saying, “Ma, I didn’t mean you”). In fact, everyone left and the woman was freed for a life of goodness by her conversation with Jesus.

I said, “Whoa,” when I heard the Gospel read because it occurred to me immediately that they are still stoning women for adultery in different parts of the world. In some more enlightened countries, they don’t stone them; they only lash them brutally with canes. Whoa.

Jesus’ clear example and message of forgiveness has been welcomed and celebrated in the centuries since the stones remained on the ground in that public square. I, along with many I am sure, am heartened by God’s steady desire to forgive me and free me for a future of goodness. Just as apparent to the crowd threatening the woman and to all those who subsequently heard this story, was that Jesus, with his invitation to the sinless to throw the first stone, was putting everyone on the same footing. He is very plainly saying that this woman and everyone else are equal. Unlike his word of forgiveness, however, this message has not been welcomed and celebrated since that day. Women are still being stoned, women are still being brutally oppressed, and women are still seen as not equal to men. In this season of conversion, I suggest you put this on your “change of heart to do list” because most of us are complicit in this sin against women.

Back in the scene with Jesus and the hostile crowd, who were the guilty ones? It wasn’t just the people with stones in their hands. It was all the onlookers, all those who never questioned the adultery laws, all those who held power by taking it away from women. In the present day, there is similar guilt to go around. Yes, we can shake our heads in disbelief that there are still societies in which women are punished by stoning. We can raise our eyebrows in amazement that large portions of the world population do not allow women to go to school or to function freely; women are forced to wear restrictive clothing and to do men’s bidding. But do not fool yourselves; the threads of guilt for the oppression of women lead to our own society. There are many things about us that put stones in our hands.

The swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated is there for all, even my young daughters, to see at the grocery checkouts. Trumping the news of genocide in Africa and crisis in the Middle East was the news of Brittney and Paris and Lindsey exposing themselves. Beauty queens are named and then censured for stepping outside norms. The cutting edge of consumer technology has been, in modern times, the pornography industry. The worries of women are not government and business and culture, but clothing and makeup and shopping. The distribution of domestic work in far too many families is still weighted toward the women. In whatever way we are part of the trivializing or the degrading of women, we are at least in the crowd of onlookers (by now, the “we” I am using is pretty much me and other men, although women contribute to all these things).

Besides these individual examples of oppression, we can turn our eyes to what our governments, businesses, boards of directors, managers, corporate officers, civic institutions, etc. look like when viewed through the eyeglass of gender. How are we changing things so that women are there?

Oh, and Churches, let’s not forget the Churches. My Church is the Catholic Church. The oppression of women is one of the great sins of the Catholic Church. We are not stoning them, but we are aiding all those who persecute women by discriminating against them in our Church. Who is pressing the fight for equal participation of women in the life of the Church? I have to confess that I’m not yet doing my part.

When it comes to insisting on the equality of men and women, we all have a dark past. The reassuring lesson of those verses from John tells us, though, that we can be forgiven and freed for a future of goodness. This Lent is as good as any to look Jesus in the eye and start living that future.