c. 1998 Religion News Service
(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph, published by St. Martin Press.)
UNDATED _ In the interest of self-disclosure, I am a registered Democrat.
I was recruited to write speeches with a”moral message”for candidate Bill Clinton in 1992. It soon became clear that he had no interest in having moral messages and I dropped out of my volunteer work.
If ever there was a time for a moral message, however, it is now.
Against the background of the moral shambles of the Clinton administration, the president’s spin team intones the words of Jesus,”He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.” This is supposed to make us back away, as it did the super-righteous bystanders _ cowards except in a crowd _ who wanted to punish the woman taken in adultery. Furthermore, aware of our own sinfulness, we are to suspend judgment and give the president a moral pass about his tawdry relationship with”that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” In short, we are to back away and abandon any notion that we can pass judgment on matters of right and wrong.
Before we accept this moral neutering, drop our stones on the ground and drift away from this central spiritual crisis of the decade, let us examine the New Testament story and review our obligations to the moral order.
In this flaccid use of the Gospel, we discover the true morality play of our times. Even the causal reader can discover just how this scriptural incident has been abused in an application that reflects a larger, persistent cultural problem.
Jesus forgives the woman taken in adultery; he understands and defends her, not the man, or men, who have taken their pleasure as they have taken advantage of her.
Jesus, we may understand, is rebuking the men, falsely brave in their uneasy comradeship, who are condemning her. Among them may well be numbered the very males who find no fault in themselves for committing adultery with this overwhelmed woman.
It is the men who cower as Jesus speaks these words. They slink away, their voices eager for blood suddenly muffled by this direct rebuke of their behavior and their hypocrisy.
If we apply this painfully clear reading to the present case, it is Monica Lewinsky who would be forgiven and sent back into a better life by the Lord.
Jesus is not saying we should forgive and forget those who shatter the moral order, bring suffering to others, and then hide behind shameful self-righteousness.
These stone-carrying and curse-uttering men are the real sinners in this extraordinary Gospel tale. They commit the sin Jesus never hesitated to condemn, that of moral hypocrisy.
Reconstructing this event, we understand that Jesus acted courageously in standing up to the condemning crowd. They might, after all, have hurled their stones at him for facing them down and reading their hearts so accurately and so boldly.
The tale does not tell us to freeze our capacity to judge moral wrong but to make it when it counts, without fear of the crowds but with a sure sense of who the moral offenders are.
The moral, then, is to be courageous enough to render and stand by our convictions whenever we discern moral wrong without fear of who, in these circumstances, constitute the clamoring crowds.
At this infinitely sad time, it is the president and the men around him who carry the equivalent of stones, the advocates, betrayed themselves, who condemn always and wish to destroy the woman _ whether it is Monica, Gennifer, Paula, Linda, Betty or Kathleen _ and are blind to their own hypocrisy as they do it.
How do we imitate Jesus during this moral crisis if not by rejecting the demonic twist of his words by the White House counterparts of the threatening crowd? They are the ones throwing stones at every woman connected with this case.
We can do no less than to turn away their argument and confront them, and the president, our hypocrite-in-chief, with the truth about his moral behavior.
DEA END KENNEDY
