Lectionary for March 30, 2025
Fourth Sunday in Lent
Joshua 5:9-12; Psalm 32;
2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Luke 15:13, 11b-32
One of the details that always sticks out to me in Luke’s version of the story of the so-called “prodigal son” is that the young man longed to fill himself with the carob pods being fed to the pigs. I remember the first time I ate carob pods. My bosses and I were sitting in a D.C.-area airport waiting to board our flight. One of my bosses, an Afghan gentleman, offered to share a box of carob pods with us. I was at the start of an adventure, eating a food I had never had before. I remember saying out loud, “Well, this is new.” The theme of the lectionary passages this week is God making all things new.
In the reading from Joshua, the Israelites and those with them are about to enter the promised land. Yet the old adage remained true: “It is easier to take the Israelites out of Egypt than to take Egypt out of the Israelites.” As their ancestors prepared to cross through the Sea of Reeds, Moses told them that they would never see the Egyptian army as they saw them that day (Exodus 14:13). Egypt would cease to have a hold on them, either for fear or for nostalgia. Unfortunately, Moses was wrong, and the Israelites repeatedly longed to return to Egypt.
Finally, after decades of wandering and when almost all of the adults who experienced the Exodus from Egypt had died, God commanded circumcision of the wilderness generation. Then all the Israelites celebrated Passover at Gilgal. The people ate the fruit of the promised land for the first time, and the manna that had fed them for decades stopped. Everything was new—Israelite male bodies, celebrations and even the food! God was making all things new.
God is making all things new and doesn’t give up on anything. Not creation, not you and not me.
In the second lesson, Paul argues with the Corinthians that they aren’t seeing the importance of newness in Jesus. When someone is reborn into God’s family through Jesus, their old self no longer exists, and they are a new creation in Christ (5:17). And as new creations, we are privileged to partake in the ministry of reconciliation, as God reconciles the world to Godself (18-19). As ambassadors for Christ, we beg—and this word is important—others to allow themselves to be reconciled to a God who is crazy in love with them, so that they, too, can be made a new creation in Christ (20).
Finally, Jesus tells the well-known parable of the wasteful son and forgiving father. I and other scholars have warned that this parable is not a simply 1-to-1 analogy between God and humans with the father and wayward and jealous sons. Still, we do see a pattern of compassion and forgiveness that is multiplied and magnified in heaven. When the son who spent much of the family wealth returned from his misdeeds, the human father, who let his child go without protest, ran out to meet him, full of compassion. He embraced his son and kissed him—though he said no words to him, only to the servants (Luke 15:21-24). When the older son came to complain of unfair treatment (and it was unfair!), the father only said, “We must celebrate your brother, since he was dead and now he has begun to live, he was lost and now he is found.” This is the closest analog to heaven in the parable. When someone is saved, Jesus testifies that there is great rejoicing in heaven—the dead come alive and the lost are found. Something new is made from something that was dead and lost.
Even during Lent, we remember that Christians are a resurrection people. We don’t look for a disembodied spiritual heaven, and we don’t become angels with harps and halos. Instead, we hold on to the much grittier, material promises of God in Scripture: the dead will be resurrected. Bodies will be remade. Jesus wasn’t a ghost. He ate and touched and cooked and walked. And so will we. God is making all things new and doesn’t give up on anything. Not creation, not you and not me.
