The casting of stones

It was the sight on TV the other night of those howling harridans mobbing Mayor Len Brown outside the Auckland Town Hall, waving placards and screaming SHAME and other mindless epithets I couldn’t catch, that finally did it for me.  The news next morning was that they showed up again in the public area at the Council meeting.  I am afraid some of them may actually be from local churches, yet again dragging intelligent and wise Christianity into disrepute.

Maybe we’ll know eventually whether Len Brown cares, or dares, to carry on as Mayor.  So far, seemingly, he does.  The councillors can’t depose him, so they had a long public debate and agreed to censure him, and they continue by any other means available to harass and humiliate him.  These are, you have to understand, Auckland’s right-thinking people of impeccable moral fibre.

In my view Len Brown does have to resign because too much damage has been done, most of which he hasn’t done himself.  It’s hard to see how he can effectively continue in the climate created.  Mostly this kind of damage is done by punitive, moralistic, self-righteous attitudes, by people demanding things, by those who howl and express high indignation from their moral high ground, censorious and actually frightened by evidence of human frailty and error.   It may include their own.  

But in the meantime, schools, retirement villages and kindy mums don’t want him at their celebratory events.  Len Brown did wrong.  He knows that.  So get over it.  I will not join in public crucifixions, or in the relentless public humiliation of someone we have decided we don’t like any more. 

And where, incidentally, are the church leaders right now, the bishops and assorted mullahs, the ones who claim to follow the man who was vilified because he consorted with publicans and sinners…?  The people who know very well that very few of us are entitled to indulge in this level of moral judgement seem to have headed for the hills.

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TVNZ treated us to some video clips from the crucial council meeting where they sat in judgement.  A room full of Pharisees.  (Well, perhaps as a New Testament scholar I can see that might be doing the Pharisees something of an injustice.)  The NZ Herald lovingly reported the remarks of each one who spoke.  One or two, Cameron Brewer and Dick Quax, seem seriously unpleasant people – the sort I’ve encountered a few times through the years, who make your spine shrivel.  Breathtakingly righteous.  Casters of the first stones. 

It is exactly like stoning for adultery.  Len Brown is daily and publicly more diminished as they pound the life out of him, led by the Herald Taliban.   Am I the only one who is finding this sickening?