Daily Scripture Reflection for 3/21/12

Scripture: Lectionary 247. Isaiah 49:8-15, 17-18. Psalm 145:8-9.13-14. John 5:17-30

Isaiah is a prophet who knows how to comfort God’s people. We are quite fortunate to hear from Isaiah during Lent. Today’s reading is most consoling and brings God’s merciful love to us in the form of its imagery and thought. We hear God saying through the prophet,”Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you.” We do well to remember this prophetic verse as we move on our journey through Lent. Such encouragement from a loving God helps us to make our lives worth living and gives us child-like confidence in listening to the loving words of our God. We need encouragement and consolation in today’s frenetic and demanding world. It is good to hear that God never forgets us. We should never forget God!

Psalm 145 is a psalm of comfort. We hear again the words of God that are covenantal. We are to see our relationship to God as a participating in God as loving, kind, and merciful beyond measure of a thousand generations.

Jesus asserts that he is one with the Father and thus will also be kind and merciful to us. He leads us to conform our lives to his in obeying the commandments of love and displaying kindness to all of God’s creation both animate and inanimate. Jesus promises us that we will have eternal life by this doing of the will of the Father as he has done through even dying for us on the Cross. The season of Lent offers us the opportunity to dwell on this love of God and to make real our part in the covenant. At the end of our lives we come to believe that life is not ended but changed. God and Jesus are constantly at “work” within this world and within our hearts. The relationship with God continues after death and shows us just how comforting a God we have with Jesus our brother who has led us back to our Creator with a new life where there is no pain and no sorrow. Amen.