³ All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. ⁴ Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. ⁵ God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. ⁶ So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear Son. ⁷ He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his Son and forgave our sins. ⁸ He has showered his kindness on us, along with all wisdom and understanding.

Ephesians 1:3-8

Dear God, I stand amazed by not only your grandeur, but also by your prodigal love. A few years ago I sat with the story of “The Prodigal Son” and I realized that we might have misnamed it. It might better be called “The Prodigal Father” because the father in the story was so seemingly foolishly extravagant with his love for both of his sons. And that story was about you.

It’s interesting that that parable is actually the third of three in a row that Jesus uses to describe you, but it’s the only one we focus on. The other two are the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. In those two parables, you go looking for your lost one. In “The Prodigal Son,” you wait. I guess the difference is that a sheep is too dumb to know their way home and might not have left intentionally in the first place. A coin is not lost because it’s the coin’s fault. But the son in this last story…well, he needed to come to the end of himself and embrace your love. He needed to want to be found.

So I read verse seven in the passage above and I think about how you extravagantly purchased me back with Jesus’s blood. I’m sorry, but that seems pretty wasteful to me. But as I sit here on the Saturday morning before Easter, after having just been to a Good Friday service last night where I thought a lot about the price Jesus paid through pain and suffering (and even then my imagination can’t wrap itself around the true horrow he experienced) for my redemption, I can’t help but be amazed by your prodigal love for me. Yes, you get frustrated with me. Yes, you have to correct me sometimes. Yes, I make you angry. But you extravagantly spilled your son’s blood so I can still be here with you.

Father, Saturday is a dark day between Good Friday and Easter morning. It’s a dark day for those who cannot see what you’re actually doing. But the real dark day is yesterday. Today is the “Harrowing of Hell.” I obviously don’t understand how all of this works. There are too many inconsistencies in the way the Bible presents what happened after death in the Old and New Testaments to confidently make sense of it (at least for my ignorant brain). But I know that Jesus’s death at this point was only a bad thing to those who sat there that day almost exactly 2,000 years ago and wondered what it was all for.

Father, I have a couple of “What was it all for?” situations in my life. So let me sit here today in the faith that my ignorance of your plan will be paid off in the same way Jesus’s followers’ ignorance was paid off on Easter Sunday back then. I know I’ll likely have to wait longer than a day. That’s okay. In the meantime, I will worship you and love othes as best as I can.

I pray this in Jesus and with your Holy Spirit,

Amen