Reading for Monday, 3rd Week of Lent

Romans 3:19-31

“For all alike have sinned, and are deprived of the diving glory; and all are justified by God’s free grace alone, through his act of liberation in the person of Jesus Christ. For God designed him to be the means of expiating sin by his death, effective through faith. God meant by this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had overlooked the sins of the past – to demonstrate his justice now in the present, showing that he is himself is just and also justifies anyone who puts his faith in Jesus” (Rom 3:23-26 – Revised English Bible)

Dante, before he could write of Paradise, had to pass through the Inferno; or as the rock singer Steve Miller once put it, "You've got to go to Hell before you get to Heaven." Paul has spent the first 2 ½ chapters of this letter taking Jew and Gentile through Hell. Gentiles had failed to recognize the evidence of one creator God all around them, and would perish forever apart from the Jewish law. The Jews had recognized their maker, had received his law, and had gone right on sinning, and thus would be judged by the law they claimed as their own.

Jews and Gentiles all – including you and me – have broken the cookie jar, and cannot even hope to put it back together. Nor can God who alone is just simply sweep the broken pieces out of sight. Justice must be executed. So how could God’s justice and God’s mercy be reconciled? Only an act of selfless love by God, which satisfies the demands of justice, could execute the justice that does not condemn, but restores. Human justice can only end with condemnation and punishment. God's justice ends with healing and restoration.

All we have to do – the only thing we can do, really – is trust God enough to look clearly at those ways in which we have fallen short of God’s righteous law, knowing that in God’s court, our fate is not execution, but reconciliation.