As the season of Lent begins, I want to give special attention to this text from today’s liturgy. This is how much God loves each one of us; this is how close He draws to each of us. Jesus “carries the burden” of our sins and opens the way to something new: a new life that overcomes sin and death, and that begins now—a transformation, a New Creation, that begins now, in Him.
Reconciliation… beyond anything our sinful humanity could have imagined. Reconciliation with God, and with one another. What a miracle! God finds me, though I had turned away from Him. He carries me on His shoulders and brings me back to the Father’s house, if I let Him, if I recognize my poverty and brokenness and let Him heal me.
And what a miracle! The persons whom I regarded as obstacles to my ambition, as objects to be manipulated for my own purposes, as enemies—I now call them “my brothers” and “my sisters.”
Reconciliation is a new beginning, and we must return to it again and again, because we fail every day, and because we must grow in this new life.
But it is an inexhaustible wellspring of mercy, “deeper” than the inertia of our weakness and forgetfulness, “deeper” than all our sins. “For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”
