Christian Viewpoint: 'Nobody’s perfect and Lent helps us remember that – and in the end, love will win'
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‘Dust and Glory’ is the theme our church at Hilton is focusing on this Lent, the six weeks running up to Easter which began a few days ago on Ash Wednesday.
It’s a time when Christians seek to draw closer to God, remembering our need of God’s forgiving love, and meditating on Jesus’s death and resurrection.
Some days recently, I’ve been overflowing with the lovely longing to be the best I can be that day with God’s help. But other days I’ve realised that even my best longings are not entirely pure.
A choice to be kind to others, for instance is prompted not just by love, but by an awareness of my own best interests.
This is precisely the significance of the ‘dust and glory’ theme.
In all of us, the dust of failure and sin co-exists with something of the loveliness of God. “The line between good and evil runs right through every human heart.”
Related: More from John Dempster and Christian Viewpoint
We are ingenious in finding ways of resisting the way of being which God calls us to.
Alongside the glory of love and self-sacrifice, joy and hope we find the sorry catalogue of dust: broken relationships, war, exploitation, lies, violence, lack of integrity, hatred.
To this massive problem there is, Christians believe, a massive solution found in the great and true story of Easter.
The Glory of God came among us in the love-sent Jesus, and died on our behalf, breaking the spell sin and death had cast upon the world, and returning to glorious life on the first Easter.
This gives rise to so many questions: If this is true, why does sin still trouble us, and blind us at times to the Glory? Why is death still rampant? Can this good news possibly be true?
At Lent we remember that the God who loves us, despite the mix of dust and glory in us invites us to come, with all our questions, and see for ourselves. Invites us to repent of our sins, to follow Jesus, and thereby find resolve to choose more of glory, less of dust.
We are, as Bishop Emma Ineson puts it “gently and lovingly restored one sinner at a time through the death and resurrection of Jesus”.
The 40 days of Lent look ahead to the joy of Easter Sunday when we celebrate that resurrection.
Through the long Lent of human history we await humanity’s resurrection and the resurrection of our broken world to wholeness.
For in the end, love will win, and as Lady Julian of Norwich glimpsed: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” No more dust, only Glory.
