On Being Saved from Becoming a Mob

Image credit: Lucas Cranach the elder, 1538

 

Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year C
6 April 2025

Isaiah 43:16-21
Psalm 126
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 8:1-11

 

As a rule, I don’t comment online. Not on politics and not on sports. It’s not because I do not have an opinion. I have plenty of opinions. It’s that I am not interested in people’s random opinions. I have also never been interested in the opinion of the man or woman in the street. I am interested in the opinions of people I know. I am interested in what you think.
I have come to the conclusion that being able to comment on anything you wish without having to first make it past the editor of an opinion page is not an advance of democracy. Rather, it is an abandoning of editorial and ethical standards. If you have ever read online comment sections you will know why. The amount of vitriol, delivered hand-in-hand with statements not supported by fact, is staggering. On social media I follow my home town soccer team and it is shocking how people who consider themselves supporters would speak about players and officials of the team they purportedly support.

Last week I listened to an interview with Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne. Coyne provided a helpful definition of populism. You see, we may think that populism has to do with populus, Latin for the people, and that it therefore must be an expression of democracy, and democracy, we all know is good. However, it turns out that we have come to misunderstand democracy as giving expression to the political will of the majority. Yet we have a constitutional democracy because we know that minorities need protection from the tyranny of the majority, because without such protections that is what it would become.
Coyne defines populism as follows: Populism is not to be mistaken for democracy. Populism always involves setting up an opposition between ‘the people’ and ‘not the people’. ‘Not the people’ are the enemy and populism always sets up an enemy. This can be the elites, or foreigners, or immigrants, or the Jews, or the media. And because populism always articulates some kind of threat that is usually defined as some kind of emergency, populists will ask for power and abandon due process in order to protect us from those ‘people who aren’t the people’.¹

Chapter 8 of the Gospel of John begins with people wanting to stone a woman to death. The chapter ends with people wanting to stone Jesus to death.
In our passage a woman is brought before Jesus who has been caught in adultery. There’s the obvious question about the man in the endeavour, and the omission of the man may be a statement of its own. But that is not the main point of the story. I also do not believe that the story suggests that fidelity is irrelevant and that certain sexual norms are passé, after all, our story ends with Jesus saying to the woman, “Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”

The story takes place around the festival of Sukkot, a harvest and pilgrim festival. Jesus is in Jerusalem. Having spent the night at the Mount of Olives Jesus returns to the temple early in the morning. Johns tells us that, “All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them.” That all the people are here is important to the story. In a way, this story is about all the people, about the masses, and about what you and I do when we are part of the masses.

The story is probably one of the better known stories in the Gospels. John tells us that the charge the religious authorities brought against the woman was motivated not by the desire for justice, or faithfulness to the Law, but in order to entrap Jesus, so that they might have ‘some charge to bring against him’. (If Jesus sanctioned her execution, Jesus would violate Rome’s rule, which reserved for itself the right of execution. If, in deference to Rome, Jesus did not allow her execution, he would be in violation of the Law of Moses.)

This makes obvious that the woman is merely incidental to the scene. She is the pawn the opponents of Jesus use for their scheme. She is not a person but an object used in the attempt to entrap Jesus. Those bringing the charge do not speak to her but about her. Perhaps she was a victim in the act she is accused of. If so, here she is victimized again.

This is the way we speak of other groups without power. We call people who suffer addictions “addicts”, and increasingly we see them as problems we want to go away, and not as neighbours and fellow citizens.
The debate about immigration in many wealthy countries is framed similarly not around need, persecution, loss of arable land, but as a burden and human beings are labelled as “illegal.”
Transgender persons are vilified as a threat rather than received as members of our communities.
There are other examples we could list here.

As the definition of populism above makes clear, this creating of enemies and of others is not the prerogative of one side of the political or religious spectrum alone. I know someone who was labelled a racist for nothing other than suggesting that hearing a headline on the news does not give us the whole story.

A mysterious element in the story is Jesus’ silence and his writing in the sand. Many have speculated about what Jesus may have been writing.² John does not tell us, and any guess is speculative and therefore not worth pursuing.
What is important is that Jesus refuses to be engaged on the terms of the woman’s accusers. He refuses to make eye-contact with those who are riled up, and thus he refuses for their anger and malice to contaminate his own heart. Remember how it is a mark of populism that any issue is an emergency and demands to be dealt with immediately? By not responding immediately and by writing in the sand, Jesus lowers the temperature.

Before Jesus dismisses the woman with the exhortation not to sin again, he says only one thing. He says to the woman’s accusers and to the crowd, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”
This has rightly been understood as a call to contrition, repentance, and humility. Jesus frequently exhorts us not to judge. It is also reminiscent of his instruction to deal with the log in one’s own eye before we turn our attention to the speck in our neighbour’s eye. (Matthew 7) But let us return to what it means to be part of a group, to be part of the masses.

I grew up in post-war Germany. In school we spoke about the Nazi regime and the holocaust at length. The big question was always why people went along with what was so obviously evil and against moral norms. An answer that floated around regarding ordinary soldiers and ordinary citizens was that resistance would have endangered them and they would likely have lost their lives.³ That, however, is not as true as one may want it to be. And even in cases where it may have been true, I don’t believe that it can possibly relieve anyone of moral culpability.

When Jesus calls on those who are without sin to throw the first stone, he is not simply asking for contrition and introspection, he is reminding us that it is hard to throw the first stone while it is easy to throw consecutive stones. While there may be a thrill to throwing the first stone, the one who throws the first stone will be remembered for having started the violence. The one who throws the first stone has no model to follow and cannot avoid moral culpability. Those who throw consecutive stones are joining a mob. They will say, I did it because everyone was doing it. The mob dynamics of Nazi Germany and the dynamic of this potential lynch mob gathered outside the temple are the same. This is one reason why social media is so corrosive to democracy. Social media has an extraordinary ability to create mobs, for it gathers people into groups isolated from their opponents and does not allow a sober second thought.⁴ Social media aids and enables mobs. Yet, with no one throwing the first stone, there is no one to follow.

In 1951 the political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”⁵

Arendt is perhaps best known for having coined the phrase “the banality of evil,” in response to her observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Eichmann was the logistics genius that made the holocaust possible.
Ten years after the trial Arendt wrote, “I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer [i.e. Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.”⁶
Arendt said that Eichmann performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’.⁷

Arendt’s analysis faced objections by those who believed that she somehow excused Eichmann. Yet, what Arendt was saying was that Eichmann could have known better but chose not to.
Think of recent statements that empathy is a sin.⁸ Well, if Eichmann had cultivated empathy he may not have engineered the holocaust.
What Arendt’s observation suggests is that we all have the potential to be Eichmanns, or in the words of Genesis 4, “… sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.”

In the story of the woman, the mob, and Jesus, Jesus does not only save the woman (while moving closer to his own death) but he also saves his opponents as well as the crowd from committing violence, from throwing the first stone, and from getting caught up in the dynamics of a mob. Jesus saves them from committing violence even while he will subject himself to their violence.

Jesus has not only saved them from the contagion of violence, from becoming part of a mob, but Jesus has given us a community that puts down their stones, that holds each other accountable, that knows that vengeance is the Lord’s, and that practices the love of one’s enemies since we who once were enemies have been made God’s friends.

As we put down our stones we show the world that there is another way, a way made possible by the cross of Christ.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.