One of the realities of Lent is that God comes close, sometimes closer than we expect, and more than we desire. We discover a God who cares passionately about our own welfare and seeks to cross the barriers that we put in place. He seeks to revolutionize our relationships by seeking to cross that divide. In particular, God wants us to notice the ways that we can trivialize our relationship by seeing it as transactional rather than life-changing. When we are used to buying things that we want when we want them it is possible to approach our relationship with God in the same way.
Yet God seeks us out in unexpected ways and overturns the tables in our temple. God seeks to deepen our relationship by understanding us and how we can seek to hide our deepest needs. God wants to consume us rather than turn us into consumers of grace. This trust of our lives in the person of Jesus seeks our belief that liberates us from that which binds us to our own limited vision of God. We discover a God who seeks to remove the barriers that we erect to that relationship.
As St Paul notices when we discover the foolishness of God and the presumed weakness of God we notice a profound wisdom and divine power at work at the heart of creation. We notice a God who seeks to love us with a passionate and heartfelt desire to enter into the heart of the lawgiver. This is not just following a set of instructions or seeking a magical solution to our problems rather it is the freedom to notice how deeply God cares for our salvation. Just as God is at the heart of all things there is a longing not to just go through the motions of Lent but to fall into God's warm embrace.
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