Dear Friends,
The first words Jesus uses in John’s Gospel are “What are you looking for?” and then “Come and see.” He invites people to come on a journey with him and learn to see and ‘be’ again. John trusts that if we follow Jesus in his story to the Cross and beyond, we may be ‘born again’, suddenly seeing everything in a new and deeper light. We may come to trust and know God’s promise of blessing ‘from the inside.’
What Jesus promises is that we shall discover, to the depths of our being, what he knew: that we are all God’s beloved ones in whom is God’s delight. That with God there can be an intimacy and security that we all long and thirst for.
If we put ourselves out during Lent, by one means or another, to follow Jesus and ‘come and see’, we may be surprised into the grace of God. Seeing with his eyes, we may discover that we are more loved than ever we believed. And that is what most of us need to experience. It will transform us.
The gathering of God’s people together week by week in rich liturgy can provide the setting for joyous immersion in faith, and mark us as new beings for ever. I hope that we can always be prayerfully offering that to others, for God so loved the world.
Soon we shall be entering the season of Lent and then six weeks later, Holy Week, when the Liturgy at S. Michael’s will be leading us through the central events of the Gospel. I hope that we can approach that expectantly, and invite others to join us, so that we may all accept the gracious call to “Come and see.”
May God bless you all.
Fr Peter Williams
God’s Generous Love
What God says to you in Jesus is this: You are forgiven. Nothing more. Nothing less. This is the message Jesus spoke and lived.
But is it really good news? And for whom?... It looks as if the good news was originally good for ordinary people, people who were not particularly pious, not particularly respectable. To them, God said in Jesus, ‘You are forgiven’.
God might have said it more simply: ‘You are loved. I love you.’ This message is true, but it would have been ambiguous. It might have meant, ‘I love you because you’re good.’ It might have meant, ‘I still love you and would like to go on loving you, but I won’t tolerate your behaviour much longer.’
Instead, God says something quite unambiguous: ‘You are forgiven.’ What this means is, ‘I love you anyway, no matter what. I love you not because you are particularly good nor because you are particularly repentant nor because I’m trying to bribe you or threaten you into changing. I love you because I love you.’
William Countryman The Truth about Love; Re-introducing the Good News
