It occurs to me also that on a personal level, all of us can fall into the trap of making assumptions about others that ultimately turn to be false or at least highly questionable. I can truthfully say that I have often been guilty of making such harmful judgments, much to my own embarrassment afterwards.

We have such a situation of false judgment and happy ending in the gospel for this Fifth Sunday of Lent. It is the well-known story of the woman taken in adultery. Interestingly, it is a kind of case history. The elders of the temple consistently tried to trap Jesus in his judgments regarding civil cases. And so, in this instance, they bring before him the woman found to be in an illicit relation with a man. (By the way, the man is not accused in this instance, which makes for another interesting legal situation.) Nonetheless, the elders place the legal case before Jesus the rabbi, teacher. If he decides that the woman should go free, he could be accused of violating the Law of Moses, which specified that a woman caught in adultery should be stoned. If, on the other hand, he should find her guilty, they would accuse him of contradicting the human law of compassion. In other words, the elders wanted to trap Jesus on the basis of his own judgment.

It is at this point that the wisdom of Jesus is clearly seen. It is clearly a case of gender discrimination. Jesus puts the elders on the defensive by asking them whether there is any among them who has never committed a sin. Silence befalls the crowd and, one by one they crept away. The only assumption one can make is that the elders themselves were guilt of sin…adultery? Who knows?

I’m sure that many people hearing this story will say, “All right. Justice is served!”

I have thought of this as “Second Chance Theology,” or the risks of false accusation. In any case, it is a happy ending story.

Notice, by the way, that the of reconciliation story is included in the liturgy of Lent; all of which invites us Christians to think about our habit of false accusation or false assumption, a tendency we have in relation to others. It is so simple to throw rocks, real or metaphorical, at others. It is true, I believe, that all of us are consistently growing up throughout our life. Every transgression is an opportunity for atonement.

It occurs to me that wherever we walk, there are rocks under our feet, a good reminder that they should be left to lie exactly where they are. Now, baseballs are a different story. One can throw and catch them without danger.

The scriptures: Isaiah 43: 16-21; Philippians 3: 8-14; John 8: 1-11