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March 9, 2020We often don’t want God’s mercy. We think we want justice. We want to justify ourselves before God. That is why we sometimes interpret our Lenten practices as a means to make us worthy of the sublime gift we celebrate at Easter. But what amount of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, how much chocolate or beer must we give up, to justify ourselves? Especially since, according to John, we lie to ourselves if we say we are not sinners.
These are hard words, but they are the source of our hope, for miraculously, the Lord does “not deal with us according to our sins.” Instead, God’s way is “compassion and forgiveness,” which generally makes God’s thinking very different from our own. We push it away because we believe we are not worthy. It is the gift of God’s own self that we receive in Christ, despite our sinfulness. God does not wait for us to be justified. As Pope Francis observes, God takes the first step of reconciliation, and Jesus Christ is that first step. Then we understand that Jesus’ words in the Gospel—“the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you”—is not a matter of tit for tat, but the promise of a life we will live into as we learn to embrace and imitate God’s ways.
