Violence against women, and why Christians don’t throw stones…..

I've tried to avoid making this blog a place where I just bang on about the things I want to complain about. That way when something does seem important enough to protest, dispute, or confront, it doesn't get lost in the constant drip, drip of low grade disgruntlement.

For the second day in a row, though, I'm both angry and feeling personally implicated by what is happening in our society. Yesterday figures for violence against women in Renfrewshire were released. Nearly 2,000 reports of violence against women were lodged last year. A specialist police task force has been set up to deal with domestic abuse in our surrounding area; you can read more about it here in the local paper. In my summer job as a student a while of years ago, I worked as an assistant social worker in Easterhouse, Glasgow. One of the first families I became involved with lived in fear of a violent partner. The consequences of this sometimes hidden and sometimes not so hidden violence were catastrophic, and the human cost in misery, fear and injury retain a long afterlife.

Then on the news this week,  video evidence of a police officer wearing reinforced gloves and body armour backhanding a woman protester on the face, before drawing a baton and lashing out at her legs. We are told that the context, the duress of the officers, the need for independent investigation mean that such actions if described as violence or assault are to be preceded by the word "alleged". That on our streets there are again images of crowd violence, and bloodied faces, police and public, needs little corroboration – bloodied faces and broken limbs are not alleged, they are real.

But in my mind a link was inevitably made. A specialist task force to tackle violence against women – and a woman protester the subject of violence from a specialist police officer. It's part of the bewildering fragmentation of our world into news clips, broadcast images, compromised  integrity and ethical erosion – but it signals a society where a deep malaise is settling over our capacity to recognise when the essentials of community life and life-enhancing human values are being threatened.

And the church? What does the church, say and do? That story that floated around in the memory of the early church, but which one way or another had to be included in the Gospels, of Jesus standing with a stone in his hand daring the men to throw it. It remains for me a definitive story about where Jesus chose to stand – somewhere between the stone thrower and the victim. Jesus understood violence – its sources in our fears and prejudices, the ways it feeds on our reductionist views of others who are different, the corrosive effects of violence on both perpetrator and victim so that unless someone absorbs its energy the vicious circle becomes cyclic, chronic, and if unchallenged, legitimated.

The church of Jesus, then, is surely the very place where we understand the significance of violence, recoil at the gratuitously slapped face, resist the use of power to abuse the person. And understanding it, we  name it for what it is. To follow Jesus is to stand between violence and the intended victim; it is to call violence to account; it is to remember that Jesus who urged the turning of the other cheek rather than retaliation, was himself slapped about by gauntlet armoured hands. But that stone, hefted in his hand and offered to men bent on violence, is one of the church's key symbols of justice and compassion. Maybe alongside our other sacramental objects, bread, the chalice, the baptistry, the basin and the towel, we also need to find a large, hefty, bone-breaking flesh-bruising stone – and lay it on the table alongside these other objects of service and vulnerable compassion; that stone, itself a sacramental reminder of our call to patient unyielding protest and spiritual resistance of those actions aimed to diminish humanity, wound the body and subdue the conscience and spirit by violence. And beside them the reminder, stones are not for throwing, they are for not throwing