Fourth Sunday of Lent 2 Chron 36:14-16 & 19-23; Eph 2:4-10; Jn 3:14-21 (Year B)
The biblical account of Israel’s history is more than a record of the past; it is a challenge to the present. Thus today’s account of Israel’s continued infidelity, leading to Jerusalem’s downfall and exile, speaks to us.
For generations a people called to holiness had ignored the prophetic call to repentance. They had become, in the words of the prophet Jeremiah, a people honouring God with their lips while their hearts were riddled with compromise.
If our Lenten observance is to be sincere, it must be more than outward show. The psalmist tells us that genuine tears of repentance came to Jerusalem only with the bitterness of exile. “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept, remembering Zion. Sing to us, they said, one of Zion’s songs. O how could we sing the song of the Lord on alien soil?”
Sin takes us into an alien land, robbing us of the joy of God’s familiar presence. It can become an exile, killing love’s joy and spontaneity. This is, for us, sin’s wilderness and exile. During Lent we face our wilderness with honesty and contrition. We do so with hope. As the God of Israel restored an exiled people to their beloved Jerusalem, so the same Lord promises healing and redemption to our wilderness.
“God loved us with so much love that he was generous in his mercy: when we were dead through our sins, he brought us to life with Christ.” It is to this mercy, and not to anything that we can achieve of ourselves, that we bring our prayers of repentance.
The words of Jesus to Nicodemus in the Gospel emphasise the Father’s enduring mercy: “The Father loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost but may have eternal life. For God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved.”
These words speak to a fundamental aspect of sinful humanity. From our earliest days we long for affirmation and dread judgment. Sometimes the dread of God’s ultimate judgment blocks any meaningful relationship with a merciful and loving Father.
Jesus spoke of the Father’s love, rather than his judgment. The only judgment to which we are called is the self-judgment of repentance. Here we acknowledge the sin that hides its darkness from the light of Christ. Faith is the surrender of our darkness to the Light of Christ. He alone becomes the light to troubled hearts.
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