Devotions for Lent 2023: Devotions for Lent 2023

By Meghan Johnston Aelabouni, Michael Coffey and Paul Hoffman

Water and Spirit provides daily devotions for each day from Ash Wednesday to the Resurrection of Our Lord/Vigil of Easter (traditionally known as Holy Saturday). Devotions begin with an evocative image and a brief passage from the Gospel of John. The writers then bring their unique voices and pastoral wisdom to the texts with quotations to ponder, reflections, and prayers.

For year A the Revised Common Lectionary assigns texts from John's gospel to the second through fifth Sundays in Lent, as well as Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Vigil of Easter. These texts are included in this devotional. Several of them are unique to John: Jesus urges Nicodemus to be born again "of water and spirit," offers "living water" to a Samaritan woman at the well, raises Lazarus from the dead, washes the disciples' feet, and surprises Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb. As you read the daily devotions, pause to think about how John describes water and the Spirit, and how water and the Spirit are at work in your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Oct 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781506491240

Book preview

Welcome

Water and Spirit provides daily devotions for each day from Ash Wednesday to the Resurrection of Our Lord/Vigil of Easter (traditionally known as Holy Saturday). Devotions begin with an evocative image and a brief passage from the Gospel of John. The writers then bring their unique voices and pastoral wisdom to the texts with quotations to ponder, reflections, and prayers.

For year A the Revised Common Lectionary assigns texts from John’s gospel to the second through fifth Sundays in Lent, as well Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Vigil of Easter. These texts are included in this devotional. Several of them are unique to John: Jesus urges Nicodemus to be born again of water and spirit, offers living water to a Samaritan woman at the well, raises Lazarus from the dead, washes the disciples’ feet, and surprises Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb. As you read the daily devotions, pause to think about how John describes water and the Spirit, and how water and the Spirit are at work in your life.

May Christ’s living water and the Spirit’s power accompany you on this journey through Lent to the Easter feast.

February 22 / Ash Wednesday

John 1:1-4

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

To ponder

In my end is my beginning.—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Nothing muffled about these drums

In the beginning was the Word. When humanity was formed from the dust of the earth, Christ was there. When we return to our parent dust, Christ will be there. Most pertinent to this day is the reminder that Christ is with us each step of our journey, even though, as Longfellow says, our hearts, . . . like muffled drums, are beating funeral marches to the grave.

Lent is a journey through the cross of Jesus to the grave. There is nothing muffled about that message. We cannot escape what Ash Wednesday proclaims: we are dust, and to dust we shall return. But through the power of the One who was present at creation, the grave to which we are headed is just not any grave. It is an empty grave, the grave left forever defeated by the resurrection of Jesus, through whom all things were not only made, but through whom all things have been remade.

By the gift of water and the Spirit in our baptisms into Christ’s death and resurrection, our end is our beginning. Each day of the Lenten season will be a day on that seemingly contradictory road. In the cross is victory; in death, resurrection; in our end, a new beginning through Christ, the life and light of all people.

Prayer

Lord Jesus, our end and our beginning, thank you for the gift of baptism. United with you in a death like yours, we shall certainly be united with you in a resurrection like yours. Empower us to walk each day with the wisdom of our death to sin and our rising to new life in you. Amen.

February 23

John 1:14, 16-17

And the Word because flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. . . . From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

To ponder

Amazing grace!—how sweet the sound—

that saved a wretch like me!

—Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, ELW 779

A wretch like me

Were someone to call me a wretch, I would take offense. Yet I sing Amazing grace! with gusto, seldom stopping to consider how its first twelve words contain the paradox of a life of faith. In the law we wretches are reminded of our need of Christ. In the gospel we find the amazing grace that Jesus came to share with all.

John uses slightly different words, reminding us that the law came through Moses and that grace and truth come through Jesus Christ. They are interlocking pieces of a puzzle. One without the other is a hollow faith. It is the wretched sinner who truly knows the need of grace. Undeserved favor is the sweetest of life’s gifts. It is also one of the most difficult to receive. We often think, what can I do to deserve this? Nothing. It is amazingly given by God, whose very being is love, poured out upon a world of wretches—like me, like you.

It was not a humanish life that Jesus lived among us. His was a life that knew firsthand the wretchedness of human illness and pain. He touched the leper, slaked the Samaritan woman’s thirst, ate with sinners, wept at the death of Lazarus. Jesus knew