For Sunday
Lent 4C
Collect
Gracious Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down from heaven to be the true bread which gives life to the world: Evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in him; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
The elements: lost, found, forgive, celebrate: these are essential to understand God’s love for us. The sadness in the younger brother who assumes he doesn’t deserve love and then, in the older brother who believes he does — this reveals how jaded and confused we are by the kind of grace Jesus describes, and how selfishly we police the concept of merit, the vision of deserving, the control we want to have over God’s grace. All of it. And yet the father looks at his son who he thought was dead is standing before him, and the response, always, when we find whatever we have lost, is to celebrate. With crazy joy and thankfulness.