Do not let us be put to shame,
but deal with us in your kindness and great mercy.
Deliver us by your wonders,
and bring glory to your name, O Lord.”
It has sometimes been said that the God of the Old Testament is a God of judgment and vengeance while the God imaged in the New Testament is one of love and mercy. Such a caricature of the God of the Hebrew Scriptures could not be further from the truth. While indeed there are stories that speak of God’s righteous judgment in the narrative of Salvation History, there is one beautiful word in Hebrew that summarizes the Lord’s overriding care for the ‘works of his hands’ in divine revelation as found in the Hebrew Scriptures. That word is Hesed, often translated as God’s loving kindness toward his people.
In our reading today from the Book of Daniel, that notion of God’s wondrous loving kindness and mercy cannot but touch our hearts – Do not let us be put to shame, but deal with us in your kindness and great mercy.
Sin is ultimately rooted in forgetfulness – our forgetfulness of who has loved us into existence and who sustains us by his loving mercy. Sin is foolishly thinking that we can somehow ‘get a better deal somewhere else.’ Such moral short-sightedness inevitably leaves us empty and sad. For as St. Augustine reminded us, “Our hearts are restless, O God, until they rest in you.”
Lent is the time of great remembrance. It is the time for us to recall and celebrate the unfailing loving kindness of the God who stands ready to make us new in his great mercy.