Rev’d Richard’s Letter (March 2024)

When I was growing up, I used to get a bag of sweets each Friday. The shop down the road sold
sweets from the jar by weight, and I would usually choose the mishaps. That way I could have a
wider variety of sweets without having to buy multiple bags. Who cared if the gummy bears had an
extra leg, or the cola bottles looked like they might have been leaking? I certainly didn’t. If the
sweets weren’t quite the right shape, it didn’t matter: they tasted just the same.
In Lent, I would give up sweets. Or at least I would give up eating sweets. I still got them each Friday,
and I would keep them in a jar. The smell when you opened the jar to add each week’s new bag was
very tempting. Just writing about it is making my mouth water. As Easter got closer, the jar would fill
up until the day itself arrived when I could open it and finally tuck in.
You may think that collecting the sweets during Lent and saving them for Easter rather defeated the
point of giving them up. You’d probably be right. But as I was thinking about Easter for this article, I
couldn’t help but think about those sweets. And what struck me about them was the fact that they
were all malformed in some way. They were all cast-offs. The people in quality control had rejected
them.
Sometimes people think that you have to be a good person to be a Christian; that God won’t love
you if you’re not good enough. But this isn’t true. The whole point of Easter is that we aren’t good
enough. Jesus came to die for us, so that we wouldn’t need to be good enough as individuals
because he was good enough for us all. It doesn’t matter if you have made mistakes, or behaved in a
way you know isn’t right. When it comes down to it, we’re a bit like those sweets. We should be in a
certain shape, but we’re not. But Jesus still accepts us in his jar. He can see past the superficial things
into our hearts, and what he sees there gives him joy.
I wish you all a blessed Easter.