In the Gospel readings all through Lent we have seen Jesus challenging the people’s understanding of God’s nature, God’s character, God’s intent and method. Besides challenging the peoples’ understanding of God, Jesus is also getting them to look at themselves and their own response to God. Week after week in Lent, Jesus has been offering us opportunities for true self-knowledge, a way out of slavery to our own self-righteousness and sin, and a way into freedom. And every week Jesus has been showing us what this freedom looks like.

In the case of my own Lenten assignment, it has not turned out that by being merciful I am learning compassion, but by being allowed to see myself as uncompassionate. It has not been so much that by forgiving I am learning forgiveness but by being allowed to see myself in a state of unforgiveness. Julian wrote down Jesus’s words, how he said to her, “Sin is behovely, but all manner of thing shall be well.” Behovely has the meaning of “necessary, inevitable, indispensable.” Sin is behovely. Julian takes this word of Jesus and spins out for us the notion that, as terrible as our falling is—and she is careful to underline it is the worst thing possible—it may actually be an integral, useful part of our salvation and that of others. She says, “It is necessary for us to fall, and it is necessary for us to see it” and also that, “the mercy of God works, protecting us, and transforming everything into good for us. Out of love, mercy allows us to fail to a limited extent, and in so far as we fail, in so much we fall; and in so far as we fall, so much we die; for it is necessary that we die in as much as we fall short of the sight and sense of God, who is our life.” And as she also points out, sin is a failure of goodness and love on our part, not God’s. God’s love always remains the same.

If we can surrender ourselves to the lavish, embarrassing profligacy of God’s mercy, we may find that we are able to begin to live it. If we can surrender ourselves to the profligacy of God’s love, we may find that a great door opens and that before us is spread the freedom of a feast we are able to offer to others and ourselves.