Let He Who is Without Sin Cast the First Stone: Musings on Human Hyporcrisy

 

I first heard the story orally when I was in college. It is a story, however, or so I am told, that is as old as the stone age. It is a story that may be so old it was spoken before it was written down.

The story that I heard that day in class goes something like this. One day the Christian god-man Jesus was in Jerusalem drawing figures in the sand. All of a sudden a crowd appeared within Jesus’s eye and ear sight. They were physically pushing and pulling a woman along in front of them. Soon the crowd formed a circle around the frightened and disheveled woman each member of the mob picking up a stone to throw at the woman who, it turns out, was caught in adultery, adultery, well female adultery being a capital crime at the time. The adulterer, of course, was no where to be found. Before the members of the crowd cast the first stone, however, one of those who was part of the mob noticed Jesus and went over to him. “Rabbi", he said to Jesus, "we caught this woman in adultery. What should we do with this criminal". Jesus quickly responded to his inquisitor, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone". The mob heard the rabbi’s word and they stopped and contemplated what Jesus said. Suddenly, however, an elderly woman that was part of the mob let a stone fly at the adulteress hitting her squarely in the chest in the process. As mobs always do after someone does something they too began casting stones at the poor woman. Soon the adultress was dead. After most of the crowd left Jesus went over to the woman who had cast the first stone and said "mother, sometimes you make me so angry.”

This story, a story with a message that is ignored by most including those who consider themselves right thinking Christians, are like many stories and tales of this ilk. This tale, like those others, is a wonderful existentialist allegory of the human condition. The crowd represents most humans since no human is a saint and all humans are, in some way, shape, or form, sinners. Jesus represents that rarity in human life, the voice of sympathetic, empathetic, and compassionate reason. The adulteress symbolises not only human hypocrisies but human double standards. Mother symbolises holier than thou human beings who can’t see the mote in their own eyes and, for those in on the parody and satire of the story, the Christian Orthodox and Roman Catholic Mary who both have turned into a saintly virgin without sin and without children despite the fact that Mary was human and Jesus had siblings, or so the New Testament claims.

Those of us alive and living with a functioning critical brain are aware of the hypocrisies of the human species every hour of every day. Some of us revel in the absurdity of pots calling kettles black, of Republicans whinging and whining about liberal violence while ignoring the violence and violent discourse in their own midst, of sinners casting stones at Joss Whedon, or Alice Munro, or Robert F. Kennedy Jnr.. while ignoring the fact that other sinners would be, in this course of ideological affairs, fully justified at casting stones at them, of Donald Trump and Joe Biden whinging and whining about violence when they engage in selective violence, mental and physical, everyday, of whinging and whining out of both sides of their mouths US Supreme Court theocratic authoritarians claiming to be republicans, of political and ideological correcties whinging and whining about the political and ideological correctness of others. There are so many human hypocrisies out there in humanland that it would take more than two hundred lifetimes to list them. As I only have one lifetime I will simply point out that humans are and forever will be hypocrites. Isn’s that pathetic and ain’t that a shame?