Why Our Tendency To Label People Is Wrong

When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her." John 8:7

Philip Yancey tells how he once visited a prison, and observed that the men who were incarcerated there were caged like animals behind doors of steel, but what left the lasting impression on him was that over each door was a sign stamped in large black letters which read: Murderer, Rapist, Armed Robber, Child beater, and on and on.  The strange thing about human nature is that we all try to package and label people, and in so doing, we trap them inside a box as certainly as though we slammed the steel door shut, pinning the sign overhead.  Was that not the same rationale when a sign was affixed to the cross in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew reading, "This is Jesus, the King of the Jews"?