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Lent Go ahead! Throw the first stone!
Fifth Sunday of Lent
By JOAN CHITTISTER
Sin is a very liberating thing. Its a shame we have
forgotten it. Just think what might not have happened in the world if we had
had a little more respect for personal sins, a little more knowledge of our
own, a little less condemnation of everyone elses. We may have been
spared the shame of the stocks in Boston, the Magdalene laundries in Ireland,
the penal colonies in Georgia, the back-alley births of so many children of
single mothers, the front-page pictures of professional people found drunk in
public and, in our own day, the Web pages of sleazy private information
released to justify the impeachment of a president. But no, as we see in the
gospel for the fifth Sunday of Lent, the story of the woman caught in adultery
(John 8:1-11), we love making sinners stand in front of us. In
public. How else can their sins take attention away from our own?
This Sunday were made to look sin square in the heart, and
were tempted to say -- if we have been trained to take Lent seriously --
its surely about time. Interestingly enough, however, we are made to look
at sin this week not to determine the way we admit our own, but to examine the
way we deal with everyone elses. The question with which the Fifth Sunday
of Lent confronts us is a serious one: Am I committed to being religious or to
being righteous? Theres a disturbing amount of difference between the
two.
We do a great number of things religiously, as if they
were sacred, with the intensity of the saints, in other words. We do our
accounting religiously, we visit our mothers religiously, we go to the
kids soccer games religiously, we walk the dog religiously, we count sins
religiously, and we practice our religion religiously -- meaning that we do the
things were supposed to do and we do them all the time. And we do them
very well. And we do them more often than anyone else. We do them so well, in
fact, that we have come to think that the very act of doing them is what makes
us holy.
To be righteous, on the other hand, is to do what is godly, to be
decent, to commit ourselves to what is above and beyond the trappings of
religion, to strive for the essence of religion, which, if we are to believe
this weeks gospel, is clearly the open-handed, foolish, measureless,
boundless embrace of the unembraceable.
The most religious thing of all Jesus shows us may be the loving
acceptance of those who have trouble doing what is religious and
right, however socially correct, however upstanding it may be,
however correct they themselves would like to be.
Thats where we begin to get a little nervous. Thats
where the spluttering starts: With that kind of loose-living attitude, what
would happen to moral standards? What would happen to the moral fiber of the
nation? What would happen to the neighborhood? What would happen to the family,
the church, the town, the office, the school if we tolerated deviance, if we
didnt stop such deviations, if we didnt require good, upstanding,
moral behavior? In fact, thats the trouble these days, isnt it?
Thats the L word. Weve been liberal.
Weve become lax. Weve deteriorated. Or rather, they have
deteriorated. We have not.
And so the new religion, which is really only more of the old one
dressed up in indignation and sour shouts of doom, is setting in. The punitive,
the authoritarian, the conservative -- meaning reactionary -- is becoming
commonplace. We want longer prison sentences for first offenders. We want
three strikes and youre out, a throw-away-the-key
approach to smalltime repeaters whose harm has been only to themselves.
Were not interested in protecting the innocent; we want to kill the
killers. We want the dissenters silenced. We want the nonconformists
excommunicated. We want the rebels reduced to nothing. We want law and
order.
So intent are we on religion that we have forgotten righteousness.
We cant understand the Helen Prejeans who walk to our electric chairs
with the condemned. We have no time for crafty lawyers who plea-bargain for the
people our newspapers convict. We deplore judges who give reasonable sentences
to decent people who have found themselves in indecent situations. We wonder
about those who consort with the people we suspect. We look with a touch of
bewilderment at all those people who treat lovingly the ones we cannot yet love
because we ourselves are still more religious than righteous. So much for Jesus
with thieves. So much for Jesus with tax collectors. So much for Jesus with
women taken in adultery. So much, indeed, for a gospel riddled with the
unacceptable, the suspect, the devious and the weak -- for the lepers and the
Samaritans and the women.
It isnt, of course, that theres no place for
accountability. Its just that theres no place for condemnation once
we face our own sins. The problem is simply that theres no place for
stoning if we are the ones supposed to be pure enough to do it.
Yes, think about sin we must during Lent. Jesus is confronted with
a sinner about whose punishment the law was plain. The Pharisees question
of what to do with her was an easy one. Jesus, if religious, should have
condemned her. But Jesus, the righteous one, did not.
What is really going on here? Whats Lenten, repentant, about
that? To understand what this gospel is calling us to do, we must think of more
than law and sin here. We must at the same time think of Sadducees and
Pharisees and Jesus.
The Sadducees were the archconservatives, the clerical caste, the
ultra orthodox of Judaism. They found the fullness of religion in the law and
their role in preserving it. The Pharisees were the liberals of the
establishment. They loved the law enough to allow it to develop and to diffuse
it throughout the whole community of Israel. The problem is that Jesus was
neither a Sadducee nor a Pharisee, neither a conservative nor a liberal. The
fact is that Jesus was too liberal even for the liberals. Jesus didnt let
the law become a barrier between him and the person in front of him. Jesus was
a radical. Jesus was a lover. Jesus was a radical lover.
Indeed, its time to look at sin in a Lent full of hard
questions. Live the real thing, be what you must, grow as you should, become
what you can, the gospels have been telling us these weeks. And now, this week,
the message is plain: Beware of letting sin consume you. No, not yours. Theirs.
The fact is -- have we forgotten as did the Pharisees in the gospel? -- that we
have more than enough of our own sin to struggle through.
Surely we are being told much more in this gospel than the fact
that we, too, have sinned, something we know only too well in the depths of our
dark hearts. Maybe we are really being told that if the world is really
deteriorating, it may not be them who are doing it after all. Maybe what is
really disintegrating now is the amount of love and listening it takes if the
world is to be propelled back into a holy, healthy, happy existence that no
amount of force and fear can achieve.
More important still, perhaps the message is more necessary than
ever in this world intent on heavy sentences and excommunications and social
shunnings. If you yourself are without sin, go ahead. There are people aplenty
out there, struggling, trying, hurting, failing. Feel free: Hunt them down.
Grind them under. Count them out. Throw them away. Chortle over their shame. Go
ahead. Throw the first stone.
Now that would really be a sin.
Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister, author and lecturer, lives in
Erie, Pa.
National Catholic Reporter, March 23,
2001
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