They “picked up rocks to stone Jesus.”
I personally find the opening line of today’s Gospel unnerving and uncomfortable. The more I thought about it, the more it reminded me of Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.”
(As a heads up, the below will include some spoilers if you haven’t read this story and will also briefly discuss stoning.)
I’m sure many of you read this story in school, but as a quick refresher--“The Lottery” tells the story of a small town that gathers yearly for a community lottery. Members of the community, and then members of the winner’s family, draw pieces of paper from a box—and the person who draws the slip with a black dot is stoned by the community. Despite not fully understanding the lottery, community members go along with it every year because it is a tradition. Some even criticize other towns for breaking tradition by no longer participating in the lottery.
While Shirley Jackson wrote “The Lottery” in 1948, its message still resonates today. It serves as a warning about the dangers of a herd mentality and conformity, and its eeriness comes in part from how realistically she tells the story.
When The New Yorker published the story on June 26, 1948, it caused an uproar. Hundreds canceled their subscriptions. Letters from readers poured in.1 The New Yorker forwarded the letters to Jackson.
With 10 to 12 arriving daily, Jackson was forced to get a larger mailbox.
Much of it was hate mail. Many were vicious, and letter writers hurled all types of insults at Jackson. Jackson reflected that the day before the story was published was “the last time for months” she got the mail “without an active feeling of panic.” Readers called the story “outrageous” and “utterly pointless.” One letter writer from Canada told Jackson that she should never come to Canada. Another wanted a personal apology. Still, another said it made them abandon “all faith in the truth of literature.”2 And these are just the mildest ones.
Reflecting on the shock this vitriol caused her, Jackson remembered, “It had simply never occurred to [her] that these millions and millions of people might...sit down and write [her] letters [she] was downright scared to read.” Of the around 300 letters she received that summer, she could remember only 13 “spoke kindly to [her], and they were mostly from friends.”3
The story’s realistic nature stood out to readers, with some convinced that it was a work of nonfiction. Indeed, it is this very realism and banality that make it eerie because they force the reader to reckon with something truly uncomfortable about human nature.
When faced with the situation of picking up rocks to stone the unlucky lottery winner or to stone Jesus, we are likely to want to distance ourselves immediately.
To respond, “That could never be me.”
Since I think we can all wholeheartedly agree that throwing stones is completely unacceptable behavior, what if we swap stones for something that may not cause immediate bodily harm but leaves an impact?
What about words? Words can cut like knives (or stones), after all.
Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel remind us that our words should match our actions, and our actions should match our words.
To use a tried-and-true adage, “Do we practice what we preach?” In the past few weeks, have we been quick to criticize or condemn others in the past few weeks? To jump to conclusions or assign blame? Have we been unfair, impatient, uncharitable, or unkind? Were there moments when our words and actions were incongruent?
Take, for example, those who wrote vicious letters to Jackson. We are all entitled to dislike a book or short story—but many of these writers were cruel and vicious, and to what end?
The letter writers quickly condemned the community's actions in “The Lottery,” but they had no problem unabashedly wielding words like stones at Jackson.
In the coming week, what is one small way we can work on resisting the urge to rush to judge others? Or to ensure that actions match our words, and our words match our actions.
1 Erin Overbey, “Eighty-Five from the Archive: Shirley Jackson,” The New Yorker, March 24, 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/eighty-five-from-the-archive-shirley-jackson.
2 Shirley Jackson, “Biography of a Story,” in Shirley Jackson: Novels & Stories, eds. Joyce Carol Oates and Ruth Franklin (Library of America, 2010), 787-93.
3 Jackson, 789.
