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The Fourth Sunday in Lent
Daily Scripture Passage: 2 Corinthians 5:16-21

As a child I told my mother, in great detail, all the tales of woe in my life. Many of these monologues involved my stories of ways in which various friends had let me down. My mother always listened, always comforted, and always advocated for me to stay in relationship with my friends. “Maybe,” she would say, “you are just going to have to be the bigger person.”

I hated hearing that. I didn’t want to be the bigger person – the one who forgave first, who reached out first, or who practiced empathy first.

Now that I am a parent of teenagers I often find myself in the place of my mother, especially when my children are fighting with each other. I can see even more clearly than before how conflict cannot end if someone doesn’t choose to reconcile – to value the essential worth of the other person over the perceived or real harm they have done.

One of the basic tenants of Christian faith is that God is always the bigger person. We follow a God who never fails to reach out first, to perceive our belovedness before our brokenness, and to stand ready for relationship no matter what we have done to trespass on that relationship. Jesus is the primary incarnation of God’s relentless willingness to put love first and to join us where we are.

What if we accepted this reconciling love, and decided to live in it’s light? What if we took the grace and love God has given us and started there with the people who we struggle to love? This is the way toward healing. This is the way toward a world made new.