God’s Active Love
As I have said, Lent is inspired by the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness wrestling with and being tested in his identity. Who was he as the “beloved son of God”? How would he live that out? What would he trade it in for? Lent is our time to ask what it means for us to be beloved children of God. (Or as the writer to the Ephesians says, God’s works of art). Asking whose we are using the four words we used to describe Jesus – how to they describe God? Who are we – how do those words apply to us? What is ours to do – how do we live them out? And what gets in the way of knowing and living all that? How do this Sunday’s readings help us in this work?
There are many who find our gospel reading (John 3:14-21) condemning and difficult. Your safe if you believe, otherwise eternal damnation! But I don’t think that fits with what John is saying in this Gospel. His focus was God’s active love of this world and God’s commitment to redeem and restore it. So let’s put this passage back and have a look.
This is part of the conversation with Nicodemus about the need to be born from above – to embrace a new identity based on God’s compassion and love (Whose are we and who are we?). As we see in this passage, just as the Israelites looked at the image of the serpent to be both reminded them of how their longing to return to slavery had caused this snake plague and provided the way to be healed; so, in John the cross both reminds us of all that separates us from abiding in God’s compassion and love, and acts as the means by which God heals us and invites back into that relationship. In the cross we are reminded of God’s deep compassion and hear the invitation to redefine our family of origin as beloved children of God.
The Franciscan writer, Richard Rohr OFM, says. “We do not think ourselves into a new way of living, but we live ourselves into a new way of thinking.”[1] Lent is a time to grow new life giving habits that allow us to abide in God’s compassion and to live that compassion for others.
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