Refusing the Fray

We are on the cusp of Holy Week, and liturgically, we are seeing the tempo of the readings quickly step up in the leadup to the Crucifixion. For those familiar with Rene Girard’s work, where it becomes apparent is in the number of instances that Jesus enters into a confrontation with a mob which, finds its most popular pre-Passion culmination in the John’s account of the woman caught in adultery by the crowds, which formed part of the Lectionary for Monday of this week.

In bringing this theme of facing the crowds to a crescendo in John, Girard alerts us to the way that Jesus gives us a new way of confronting the mob.

Let us take this step by step.

First, Girard notes that an ongoing motif in the Gospels is Jesus’ confrontation with a crowd. The crowd, according to Girard, is not an accidental element in biblical accounts. On a surface level, the crowds represent the “mob mentality”, a unison of thought that also holds no one single person accountable for having that thought. In Girard’s mimetic theory, the crowd is also the culmination of escalating rivalries which, not finding resolution within itself, unanimously turns on a single scapegoat in a united fashion - In Girardian terms, it is the “all against all” that escalates and snowballs, and ultimately finding an outlet in an “all against one”. The case of the woman caught in adultery is a very subtle instance of this scapegoating mechanism.

What is interesting is that the Roman Lectionary for that day foregrounds the reading of this Gospel account with a similar account in the Old Testament, the trial of Susannah in Daniel 13. As in the Gospel, a single woman Susannah, is taken by the crowd and accused of adultery, acting as the scapegoat. However, there is a circuit-breaker, the young Daniel stepping into the middle of mob’s anger and becoming Susannah’s sole defender, confronting them by asking “Are you such fools (Dan 13:48)?”

At the end of the reading, however, Daniel brings the issue of the mob to a resolution by channeling the mob’s anger away from the innocent to the guilty. In this instance, justice is done, but the mob’s violence against a single target remains.

Something different takes place in the Gospel.

As in the case of Susannah, the case of the woman caught in adultery is a very subtle instance of this scapegoating mechanism. At first glance, she appears to be the scapegoat of the mob. Upon closer reflection of the text however, we find a slippage in the scapegoating. In the Gospel, upon presenting the woman, the crowds then ask Jesus on what he thought of the Mosaic Law’s mandating of execution by stoning. In turning their attention away from the woman and persisting in their question, the crowd are shifting their capacity to scapegoat onto Jesus.

In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard notes the precarious position Jesus finds himself:

In the Gospel episode of the woman taken in the act of adultery, if Jesus had not convinced the crowd, if the stoning had taken place, Jesus would have risked being stoned himself. Failing to save a victim threatened with collective lynching, being the only person at her side int eh face of the crowd, is to run the risk of suffering her fate also. (59)

Now, Jesus could have joined the crowd by referring to the letter of the Law. This is not what he did. Instead, what he does is bend down and write on the ground. While many focus on the writing, Girard (writing in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning) focuses on the bending down.

Girard sees this bending down as a refusal to face down the mob, a move that differs from Daniel. Still commenting on the Gospel account, Girard says in I See Satan…:

If Jesus returned their looks, these angry men would not see his look as it really us but would transform it into a mirror of thei own anger. Their own challenge, their own provocation, is what they read int he look of Jesus, no matter how peaceable it really is, and they would feel provoked in return (60).

In other words, Jesus steps into the fray like Daniel. Unlike Daniel, however, Jesus does not enter into a rivalry with the crowd. Indeed, he refuses to confront the crowd at all.

He does lift his head once, to be sure, but when he does, it is not with the same accusation with Daniel. Instead, Jesus ask for the one who is without sin to cast the first stone.

Now, most readers of the Gospel would pay attention to the part about “being without sin”. For Girard, however, he finds significance in the implication that comes from being sinless, the privilege of throwing the first stone. The reason for this is that, in Girard’s words: “The first stone is the last obstacle that prevents the stoning”.

For Girard, it is easy to follow the actions of the mob. It is much harder, however, to act first and incite the mob. In drawing attention to the first stone, Girard says that Jesus is also drawing attention - indeed he magnifies it - to the vast responsibility placed on the person who would presume to cast the first stone, making it easier to be the first person to drop the stone than throw it.

When the first stone is dropped, however, something else occurs. We see an inversion of the mob where, according to the Gospel, there grew a wave of those dropping their stones and leaving. In Girard’s words, this was:

Another contagion in the reverse direction [that is] set off…From the moment the first individual gives up stoning the adulterous woman, he becomes a model who is imitated more and more until finally all the group, guided by Jesus, abandons its plan to stone the woman (57).

In stepping into the fray, Daniel succeeds by redirecting the anger of the mob. In his own insertion into the mob Jesus succeeds by inverting the mob altogether, and introducing new patterns to follow.

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