Man of Sorrows, People of Hope (Lent 2, March)

Lent 2, March 2021 (7 March - 3 April). See the Resource Pack PDF for information on the weekly subthemes and the daily prompts and Bible readings which shape our Daily Worship.

Download our new Lent 2021 Resource Booklet PDF which covers February and March for discussion questions, meditations, and mindful action prompts to help us prepare for and then travel together through the season of Lent. You can use this material on your own while journalling, in your household studying together, texting back and forth with a friend, or in an online group like a Connect Group. Feel free to adapt it to suit your needs.

A man of sorrows who inspired a people of hope…

Jesus meets us in our delight and wonder, our boredom and frustration, our longing and restlessness and in our sorrow and shame. Jesus lived a human life among us and felt the sting of rejection, the heartache of disappointment, and the pierce of loss.

Last month, as Lent began, we looked at The Parable of Social Distancing — how our current safety measures of ‘social distancing’ can be read as a parable of how we have already been increasingly ‘socially distant’ from one another for years,  becoming in many ways disconnected from those around us as we focus on our own individual needs.

Jesus becoming one of us was a phenomenal act of social reconciliation that burst into the normal run of history. Divinity met humanity in a theological, political and cultural kaleidoscope.

Jesus’s life contained sorrow, indignity, oppression, slander, violence and suppression and yet it was also beautiful, daring, loving, inspiring, enriching and vibrant. Christ’s life among us is itself a parable. His life — with all its good, its bad and its ugly mattered and had so much worth. It is a story of darkness and light. Struggle and triumph. In the same way that our lives striving and delighting, laughing and weeping matter and have worth. Jesus’s very life tells us that no matter the cost you can’t put a price on love. 

In Jesus’s life, death and resurrection is a fulfilment of a story told again and again through the Bible and human history — of God reaching through the thorns and weeds and branches to tell us we are loved and that we can take hope.

Each week of the four week theme runs Sunday-Saturday and has its own subtheme, which contains daily Bible readings and thought triggers (see the Resource Pack PDF for more information). Download our Lent 2021 Resource Booklet for discussion questions, prayers, meditations and Lent Legacy mindful action prompts.