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Gospel Talk with Children: We Celebrate God Who Saves

Margaret (Peg) Bowman

The most solemn days of our liturgical year are upon us. There are so many directions in which our thoughts, prayers, lessons, and homilies can take us as we journey through Lent to Easter and on to Pentecost. However, our task is simpler when we focus on the Gospels: Sunday after Sunday as we listen to and reflect on each Gospel passage, we are drawn face-to-face with Jesus, God-made-Man, God-Who-Saves. We are also drawn face-to-face with ourselves, sinful human beings.

Gospels of Lent
In each Sunday’s Gospel, we will see Jesus having another experience with sinful humanity. As always, the First Sunday of Lent finds him in the desert being tempted by Satan. The version of this story from Matthew’s Gospel is coupled with the first reading from Genesis, in which Satan tempts Eve to eat the fruit that has been forbidden. We see the stark contrast between the two readings. The choice made by our first parents has led Jesus to his choice. Jesus not only made the choice to reject these temptations from Satan, but he made the much harder, more sustained choice to be human, surrounded by the effects of sin. Jesus could never forget he was to be the Savior, surrounded as he was by so many reminders of our sinful human condition. Tell children that in this story Jesus did what Adam and Eve did not do. He obeyed God. When he resisted the temptations of the devil, the devil left him.

This God-made-Man, our brother Jesus, might well have asked what he had gotten himself into. Incarnation as a concept might sound wonderful. To save us, God became one of us. He was never a sinner, but living here among us, he certainly experienced the effects of our sins. At the end of the Advent/Christmas Season, we left him on the banks of the Jordan River being baptized, not because he needed it, but because we do.

Sunday after Sunday in Lent, we follow Jesus toward Calvary, and Sunday after Sunday, his companions in these Gospel passages prove again their need for a Savior and our need for a Savior. We begin Lent with the responsorial psalm antiphon, “Be merciful, O Lord, for we have sinned” (Psalm 51:3a). We don’t sing it every Sunday, but it would fit if we did. These Lenten Gospels introduce our children to the attitude of human and divine mercy, to the symbol of water, and to the power of God to heal the blind and sick and to bring life from death.

From Easter to Pentecost
We continue the journey and follow Jesus to Gethsemane, to Jerusalem, to the cross, and the tomb. His actions are for only one purpose—to save us—for we have sinned. Our sinful nature is certainly a subtext in the readings of Holy Week. Yet his triumph, recorded each week from Easter through Pentecost, does not paint a different picture of the people around him. Jesus has triumphed; Jesus is alive and still with us; Jesus truly is our Savior. However, his followers in the Easter Gospel stories, and all of us, still need a Savior. Jesus has saved humanity, but he has not changed human nature.
In every Gospel after Easter, there is someone who doesn’t understand, someone who still cannot see. In the midst of our joy on the Fifth Sunday of Easter we find ourselves singing the responsorial antiphon, “Lord, let your mercy be on us, as we place our trust in you” (Psalm 33:22). Even when the Holy Spirit arrives on Pentecost, the Gospel for that day takes us back to Easter evening when Jesus gave the apostles the power to forgive sins. From the beginning of Lent until Pentecost, we hear echoed: “Be merciful, O Lord, for we have sinned.”

A Celebration of God’s Merciful Love
Is this evidence of what some people jokingly or ruefully call “Catholic guilt,” a sort of Catholic obsession with sin? I think not! Our “obsession” is not with sin, but with salvation. Our purpose in telling these stories is not to wallow in guilt, but to delight in God’s merciful love. Our purpose in following Jesus on his Way of the Cross is not to indulge in morbid self-accusation but to engage in prayerful adoration and thanksgiving. As we watch the disciples blunder at every turn after the resurrection, we don’t despair for them or for us, but we are amazed at the merciful goodness of God.

It is not guilt, but joy that has us pray and teach our children to pray and to begin to understand the astonishing words of the Exsultet sung at the Easter Vigil: “Father, how wonderful your care for us! How boundless your merciful love! To ransom a slave you gave away your Son. O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer.”
Margaret (Peg) Bowman is the director of liturgy at Sacred Heart Parish in Marengo, Illinois, and is a frequent contributor to Catholic periodicals on catechesis and parish liturgical life.