It’s now been about four years since I stopped working inside a big company and started being self-employed. Sometimes people ask me if there’s anything I miss about my former life. And you know, there are some things. I liked how somehow, magically, every two weeks, like clockwork, money got deposited in my checking account. The same amount every time, no matter how hard I worked or didn’t work, or how bad a job I did. I liked that. I haven’t yet discovered any pattern whatsoever to the way money gets added to my checking account now, so there’s one thing I definitely miss.
But if I think about it, there are other things I miss. One of them is how rewarding it is to be a part of a larger group. People can do things working together that they can’t possibly do on their own, people’s strengths come to the forefront, and if you have weaknesses, they can get compensated for by someone else, who’s better at doing some particular thing than you are. That’s how great things are accomplished. The fact is, we can’t live without being part of a group, all kinds of groups, a citizen of a America, a resident of West Windsor, a member of a family, a member of a church. These groups strengthen us and support us and shape us. All good.
It’s so good, and so natural a part of life. That’s why it is so hard for us to see the ways that groups, these same groups that can be so beneficial for us, can lead to our downfall. Every group has rules, that’s how they survive, rules about what’s good and evil, about how we behave and how we don’t, about how we punish and how we reward. Rules are good. Except when the rules the group lives by become the only rules that the people in it live by. Groups become inflexible, unbending, unforgiving, and people simply can’t afford to.
Today’s famous reading about the woman taken in adultery and hauled in front of Jesus isn’t about sin, whether she sinned or not. It’s about our reaction to sin. It’s about how easy it is for the upstanding to lose sight of their own sin and their own weakness, because they are so aware of how everyone should be judged. It happened to these Pharisees, who were more concerned about whether Jesus was in their group or out of it, whether he accepted their rules, than they were about their own sin and anger and jealousy. I always feel a little bad for the Pharisees, because in a way they’re overdrawn, aren’t they. We can almost see how uptight they are, how threatened, spluttering in frustration when they’re outwitted. It’s hard to see them for what they really are: good people, people of faith, people who know the rules but let their righteousness convince them they were better than they were.
Their situation may seem obvious to us, they’re stock figures, not like us, but what happened to them isn’t unusual. It happens to all of us, whether we notice it or not. It happens in school when a group turns on and ostracizes a kid who’s a little annoying, it happens in companies where the rules of business get to be more important than the rule of compassion, it happens whenever people find it so easy to be part of a group that wants more punishment, more retribution, because some group, after all, has to stand up for the rules. Maybe especially it happens to otherwise upstanding and upright people, because what the group seems to stand for is so admirable, it has happened to bishops who decided that protecting the church was more important than protecting the faithful, it happens to everyone who lets their awareness of their own sin fade away because they are so certain they can recognize it in others.
Jesus in this gospel breaks up a group meeting faster than anyone else in history by asking them, just for a moment, how should you be treated if you were not a member of the group you’re in, but just you, alone, in the same situation as this woman? Would you be so certain of your opinion if you were the outsider, and not the insider? It’s a good question, because ultimately, it is us on our own with God, not us the teacher or the good Catholic or the American or the soldier or the businessperson, but just us, with our own goodness and our own heart and our own life.
Crowds come and go, we’ll see that above all next Sunday when we hear the story of Jesus’s death, and we’ll see a crowd cheering him wildly as he enters Jerusalem, like they’re cheering a prizefighter entering the ring, and just as suddenly, gone, deserted, as they lost interest in a story once the spectacle was over. Crowds come and go, groups come and go, and here at the end of Lent we find ourselves like each of these Pharisees, one on one with Jesus. That’s ultimately the way Jesus wants us, not the groups we’re a part of, just us. And one on one, the only option we’ll be left with is forgiveness, to ask for it, to give it to ourselves, and to give it to someone else who doesn’t deserve it.