Just to be fair, we should start any reflection on this gospel with a word in favor of rules. The fact is, rules are good. Moral laws are good. They’re good, because we need them, rules about what’s good and evil, about how we behave and how we must not. After all, God has told us clearly to live according to his law of love and justice, and that means rules. And not only that, we are asked to have confidence in our judgment. If we know something is wrong we are obligated to speak out, when we see sin, it’s sometimes necessary to come out and say so.
But here is the problem. It’s because a strong moral compass is so important to our lives, that it is so hard for us to see the ways that our confidence and moral judgment, the things we need to get through life and do great things, can also lead to our downfall. Rules are good, except when the rules we live by ever so gradually become rules primarily about other people and how they should be, and not about ourselves. Rules can make us unbending, unforgiving, smug. And few people made Jesus as angry in the gospel as the world’s confident and unforgiving judges.
Today’s famous reading about the woman taken in adultery and hauled in front of Jesus isn’t about whether she sinned or not. It appears that she did, but that isn’t really the focus of the story, is it? 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 part of their adultery patrol, and whether he accepted their rules, than they were about their own sin and self-righteousness. I always feel a little bad for the Pharisees, spluttering in frustration, always outwitted. It’s hard to see them for what they really are: good people, people of faith, people who know the rules but whose self-righteousness made it impossible for them to see themselves.
What happened to them isn’t unusual. It happens to all of us, whether we notice it or not. It happens whenever a group we’re part of, the rules the group follows, gives us the confidence to judge and shun someone else. 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 are attracted to a group that wants more punishment, more retribution, more anger, more exclusion. It seems right to us to judge others, because some group, after all, has to stand up for the rules and protect everyone else. But that only makes it more likely for us to go wrong, because what the group seems to stand for is so admirable. People, all of us, let our awareness of our own sin fade away because we are so certain we can recognize it in others.
Jesus in this gospel breaks up a group meeting faster than anyone else in history by asking people, just for a moment, how should you be treated if you were not a member of the group you’re in, but it was just you, alone, in the same situation as this woman? Would you be so certain of your judgment if you were the outsider, and not the insider? If it were your sins under discussion, and not someone else’s? It’s a good question, because ultimately, it is us on our own with God, but just us, with our own weaknesses. Not us as a member of a group with rules we believe in, but just us, alone.
During the next two weeks here in this church we’re going to learn a lot about the behavior of people in crowds. Mostly we’ll learn that 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 him once the spectacle was over. Crowds come and go, the groups we are a part of come and go, and that means ultimately we find ourselves like each of these Pharisees, like the woman taken in adultery, one on one with Jesus. That’s ultimately the way Jesus wants us, 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.
It’s become a custom now when people talk to one another about how we should behave when we see someone acting immorally, to tell ourselves that we should “hate the sin, and love the sinner.” That might sound generous, but even that isn’t entirely correct. This gospel pushes us a little harder: First we should hate our own sin. Then love the sinner. Jesus tells us today that we are only good judges of others when we live knowing that the first sin that needs correcting is always ours.