Focus: Jesus gets in the middle between us and the forces of evil.
In our house growing up, we often heard the phrase, “Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones”—usually followed by a piercing “Mom-look.” In other words, don’t throw around accusations unless you’re perfect. The phrase goes back to the Gospel of John [8:2-11]. A woman is caught in adultery, and Jesus gets right in the middle of an angry mob about to put her to death and says these famous words: “Let whoever is without sin cast the first stone.” One by one, those in the mob all walk away—and finally, so does the woman, unharmed.
Yes, we’ve probably all heard about “stone-throwing.” But what about stone-catching?
Near the end of Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer who defends people wrongfully condemned, talks of a person he met at a courthouse in New Orleans. She had first come to the court fifteen years ago when her grandson had been murdered. She watched the judge sentence the perpetrators, teenage boys, to life in prison and said, “I thought it would make me feel better but it actually made me feel worse.” After the decision, a random person came and just let her cry for a couple hours until she felt a bit better. This experience was so powerful that she committed to coming to the courthouse every day the next fifteen years to make herself someone people could lean on, whether families of the victim or the accused. She said, “All these young children being sent to prison forever, all this grief and violence. Those judges throwing people away like they’re not even human, people shooting each other, hurting each other like they don’t care. I don’t know, it’s a lot of pain. I decided that I was supposed to be here to catch some of the stones people cast at each other.” 1
Stone-catching. That’s a lot more work than just not stone-throwing. But what if stone-catching is what we are called to do?
Our Old Testament story today continues the series of covenant (deal, pact, relationship) stories with the most famous covenant in the whole book: Mount Sinai—the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are a set of rules that I think most of us probably sum up in three words: Thou shalt not: commit adultery, make unto thee a graven image, steal, murder, and so on. Understood this way, it’s really not so bad. If you haven’t killed anyone in the last week, you may think you can already check one off your list—not a bad start! Except that people going all the way back to Jesus and to Jewish interpreters long before him have always said that each commandment doesn’t only mean don’t do something; it also means something positive that you’re supposed to do.
One that comes to mind in our day and age is the eighth commandment: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” The surface level meaning? Don’t tell lies about your neighbor in everyday life, and esp. not in court where the lies have a huge impact. Martin Luther says it means something a bit more for Christians: “We should fear and love God so that we do not desert or deceive, betray or besmirch our neighbors, or wreck their reputations, but 1. Speak up for them, 2. Speak well of them, 3. And always assume the best about them.” 2
What does that mean? In a word, stone-catching. That’s really hard. Most of us would rather not get involved. We say I’d rather not get in the middle of it. Nikki and I recently watched the movie Wonder 3 about a boy whose face is marked by a serious and visible physical disability who finally starts school after years of home-schooling. Did I mention the school he’s starting is middle school? Yeah. After a month or two of class, he finally makes one friend. He is crushed when he sees the friend talking with a few of the cool kids about how terrible he looks and about how his life must really not be worth living. His friend never really believed these things about him. It was just easier to go along with what was being said than take a stand. The movie finally changes when his friend stands up for him, and then others start standing up for him, and finally he is able to stand up for himself.
That is the power of stone-catching. Stone-catching saves people’s dignity. It saves the dignity of the person people are throwing stones at: they are no longer deserted, besmirched, betrayed. It saves the dignity of the stone-thrower: calling them to think about what they are saying. And finally it saves the dignity of the stone-catcher: they become someone who does the right thing even when it’s unpopular or hard.
And man is it hard. Our society does not place a lot of value on stone-catchers. We place a lot more value on the people who come up with the “quick diss,” the slam dunk tweet, the “politically incorrect” [read: “mean”] speech, the gossip, the person who “tells it like it is.” If you stand up and get in the way: if you defend an unpopular person’s reputation, if you correct someone who’s telling a lie, if you call out hypocrisy, you will not make many friends.
But the thing is: when the stones are coming in at you, don’t you really want that person who will step in and catch a few of them before they hit? Don’t you want someone who’s not afraid to step in, to do the right thing, to say the loving thing, to get in the middle.
That’s what Jesus did for us. When the woman was accused of adultery, Jesus got into the middle of a violent situation and with a word of truth and love restored everyone’s dignity. When the Temple had become a marketplace, a den of thieves, and home of religious hypocrites, Jesus got in the middle and made a scene, calling everyone to the dignity of children in “his Father’s house.” Finally, when the stones came for him and no one was left to defend him, he got in the middle between his accusers and the righteous anger of God and said, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”
This is the foolishness of the cross. From a self-interested perspective, being a stone-catcher doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s a better “business decision” to lie low, to go along to get along. But that has never changed lives, it has never restored anyone’s dignity, it has never led to resurrection and new life in our relationships and in the world. On the cross we see the one who gets in the middle: between sin and judgment, between the devil and humanity, between death and resurrection, between the world the way it is and the kingdom of heaven Jesus is creating, between the stones we throw at each other and the stone that was rolled away from the tomb on the Third Day.
Once again, in Lent, we are asked: what are we willing to risk? Are we willing to not only opt out but to confront this death-giving cycle of lies and hate? Are we willing to get in the middle for our neighbors? Are we willing to be stone-catchers?
1 Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy (London: Oneworld Publishers, 2015), 307-8.2
Martin Luther, Small Catechism: Memorizing Edition, tr. Sarah Hinlicky Wilson (Thornbush Press, 2020), 15.
3 Wonder, Stephen Chbosky (Lionsgate, 2017).