Devotional for Third Lent

Scripture reading: Luke 13:1-9

One of the persistent failures of the human condition is our presumption that we are the center of the universe. Believing that "things have never been as bad as this" or that "those sins that I abhor in others are the worst of all sins" reveal a certain arrogance in us. We are not seeing things rightly or truthfully when we think this way.

In many ways, this is the mindset that Jesus is calling out in the Gospel text from this past Sunday. He's given two tragic examples of the current events of his day, a tower collapse and an attack by Herod's thugs on some Galilean worshipers in the temple. The human impulse is to claim that victims of these tragedies are somehow deserving of their fate. (If you've been keeping up with my Sunday sermon series this Lent, you know how much I just "love" that word.)

Jesus not only refutes this but he does so in a way that should make us all a bit uncomfortable. No, their sins weren't any worse than yours, so if they deserved to die for what they've done, SO DO YOU.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that I'm talking about this Luke text the day after I received Michael Card's latest email newsletter. In it, he included a reflection that tells a similar truth, speaking about these current times.

There are two major misunderstandings, it seems to me, that might tempt us to lose hope right now. The first is the failure to realize that world has already been lost. It is no less "lost" at the moment than it has ever been, and no less crazy. Even a casual flipping thru any history book will confirm this.

Again, the presumption of our own self-importance blinds us to this truth. We are lost and we are rightly deserving of damnation. But Michael doesn't end there.

The second misunderstand that leads us to lose hope is that there is no one who has the power to make things right. To a lost world Jesus says "I am the way." To a world that has departed from the truth, Jesus says, "I am the Truth." And to a world that is on a collision course with death, Jesus says, "I am the Life."

Immediately after telling the crowds the uncomfortable truth about our sin, Jesus tells a wonderful parable about a patient gardener. "Give it another chance. Give it another year. Give it time." Give it grace.

Grace is the infinite number of second chances that God gives to us out of his love for us. And that is our hope. All may seem lost, but God is in control here. Not us. And we are not lost because it is he who finds us. We are not lost because he loves us. We are not lost because our patient gardener is giving us another chance and will always give us another chance. That's grace, and in grace we find hope, for ourselves and for our lost world.