With so much emphasis on sin and redemption during the Lenten season, you might overlook an incredible fact: You have already been saved.

We can’t redeem a single past hour of disgrace and make it not so, but God can and does redeem all of human history, not with an eraser but by restoring what’s been lost. Dis-grace can only be healed by being re-graced in the healing power of divine forgiveness. We all suffer the disgrace of this woman. As the prophets declare repeatedly, we’re all adulterers, unfaithful to the one who brought us into being. Only those of us who’ve bought the lie of self-righteousness would consider picking up a stone to use against a sister or brother human being. This woman’s fidelity or lack thereof is not our concern. It’s our own faithlessness we should be mortified about and seek to amend.

While we struggle, especially during Lent, to open ourselves to renewal by the purifying Spirit of God and God’s word; while we start, yet again, to embrace afresh the power of our baptism, a sense of humor goes a long way to making sure our goal is righteousness, not self-righteousness.

The Lord has done great things for us. We make our prayers to God with confidence in God’s power and love.

Jesus’ words and actions move the story from being a morality tale to one about the dangers of self-righteous religious legalism. The Law never overrides God’s mercy. Only God stands in judgment of human beings, not human beings of one another.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once observed: “If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us . . . . we will remain addicted to putting people and things in their “right” place. —Henri J. M. Nouwen