The prophet Jeremiah speaks of a new covenant that God will form with His people. It’s not the kind of covenant that’s based on the faithfulness of people. Instead, this covenant is known by the virtue of forgiveness that God will give to every person. God assures us in this new covenant that His law will be written in each of our hearts, and from greatest to least, we will know of Him because He has forgiven our sins. We will come to know God by His gift of forgiveness to us!

Most of us come to know God because someone else tells us about Him. We read Bible stories and see children’s movies of the actions of God in the Old Testament and Jesus in the New Testament. We come to God through the testimony of other people. By the witness of their lives, we come to know Him more clearly. The real transition in the spiritual life is moving from a concept of God that claims He gives us what we deserve to an experience of God who gives forgiveness as a gift even though we don’t deserve it. The gift of this new covenant began with the Old Testament people of Israel and continues to our day.

Try to take that Old Testament story and place it up against the interaction we hear of Jesus with His disciples from the Gospel of John. Some Greek people want to meet Jesus, so they tell one of His disciples. That disciple goes through the chain of command until they actually get to Jesus. The response that Jesus gives is probably not one that we would imagine. He begins to talk about His impending death and His need to follow through with the plan that has been set long ago. It’s almost as if He doesn’t want to be sidetracked by new audiences, but He has His face and heart set toward Jerusalem, clearly understanding what His task is.

I would like to offer a practical application from these Scripture readings. Imagine a moment when you experienced the gift of God’s forgiveness in your life in a personal way. Can you remember a time when you experienced God’s forgiveness and you know you didn’t deserve it? As a child we can claim ignorance, but as adults we often know the choices of evil that we are making and we choose to do them anyway. If there was a time in our lives when we deserved to be rejected by God, it would be at these moments. But instead, God chooses to forgive us so that we might know the depths of His mercy. Obviously He does that for our sake, but He also does it so that we can exercise the same mercy toward others. There might be those in your life right now who you believe don’t deserve your acts of love or your sacrificial living for their sake. Do it anyway. Follow the footsteps of Jesus. We don’t sacrifice our lives because people deserve it; we sacrifice our lives because we follow in the footsteps of Jesus. That is who we claim to be — disciples of Jesus Christ.

We are getting pretty far into Lent now, and there is not a lot of time to put off what needs to happen for us to truly celebrate Easter. A resurrection needs to be preceded by some dying. What is the dying that still needs to happen in your life for the resurrection of Jesus to make more sense to you? Who doesn’t deserve your sacrificial life? Who will you give it for anyway? Today is the acceptable day. The kingdom of God is at hand.

Father Donald Wester is pastor of All Saints Parish in St. Peters.