“We love because he first loved us.” I decided to take this Scripture text as my guide this Lent. It puts things in the right order. All our efforts at repentance and reconciliation—important as they are—ultimately, are a response to God’s love. It is God’s love that goes before us, accompanies us, and brings our repentance to completion. Lent is a perfect time to reflect on this love.
Today I would like to look at one particular form of God’s love, a rather extreme one, at least as St. Paul describes it. In the second reading, Paul as God’s ambassador was imploring us to be reconciled to God. He builds his case by showing us how God has closed the gap between us and to what lengths he will go to break down the dividing wall of enmity between us: "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.”
But how can it be that “…he made him to be sin who did not know sin…”? Our Lord Jesus never sinned. He was wholly ordered to the will of his Father. What does it mean that he was made sin? A passage from Galatians sheds light on this: “Cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree.” On the cross Our Lord endured every estrangement, every aspect of shame, every misery that human beings could inflict, because he wanted to offer us his friendship and make reconciliation a possibility from God’s side. Jesus became a curse for us to show us that nothing can separate us from his love. And from that extreme point of the cross, the blessing of Abraham has been extended to us, “…so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith,” as Paul says.
This is the good news of Lent: we have a co-worker in the work of reconciliation—the Spirit of Jesus. Out of love Jesus took upon himself the curse of all sin, and because of this the Father has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts. The Spirit of Jesus makes it possible for us to be faithful and upright in the Father’s sight. By the Spirit we can become holy—we must become holy as Jesus is holy. Let us believe in this gospel and be reconciled to God, for he loved us first.
