Dei Potestas en Terra

Quote Follows: (listening to: Nobuo Uematsu, "Final Fantasy Theme")

"A great rabbi stands teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine... has told me of two other rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.)
The rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears, and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. 'Is there not anyone here,' he says to them, 'who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?'
They murmur and say, 'We all know the desire. But, Rabbi, none of us has acted on it.'
The rabbi says, 'Then kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong.' He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, 'Tell the Lord Magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he'll know I am his loyal servant."
So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.
Another rabbi, another city. He goes to her and stops the mob, as in the other story, and says, 'Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.'
The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I'll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated.
As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman's head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brains to the cobblestones.
'Nor am I without sin,' he says to the people, 'But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it.'
So the woman died because her communtiy was too rigid to endure her deviance."
(O.S. Card)

Surely all of us know the origin of this story, and the purest ending to it. The first story presented here shows perhaps, what most would see as an abberration. Corruption in the church. A rabbi protecting his own interests by protecting the favor of those in power. But the second makes an excellent point: Can the teachings of Jesus really truly be applied in today's society? Think of what Jesus taught us: Turn the other cheek. Give to the man who steals your coat your shirt as well. Be meek, and inherit the earth. To provide some context, just in the last week, according to Jesus, I should have found the guy who took my cell phone, and given him my laptop as well. I should have encouraged Vaulted to continue his/her beratement of me on my site to continue, and in fact provided them with a better means to do so. I should not seek to excel at my job, or in my acting, so as to not gather the attention or fame of the rest of the world. Do we know anyone like this in our lives? Someone who seeks not to excel in anything, but instead leads a quiet life of dull mediocrity?
Surely, even Jesus himself fell victim to unintentional star power. He rode into Jerusalem on the highest holy day on a donkey, while hundreds of people threw palm branches down on the road and shouted, "Hosanna! Glory be to God!"

Now, before all you Christian Conservatives get all uppity on me, let me explain. I'm not trying to claim Jesus to be a hypocrite, nor am I saying that Jesus himself sought celebrity status among the people of his time. I'm inviting dialogue: How can the teachings of Jesus be applied to a world (both then AND now) where they seem to be a recipe for disaster?
Are we to understand Jesus as giving us a theory, or a philosophy that should be followed in spirit, rather than in letter?