Fourth Sunday in Lent AD 2026

In today’s Epistle, Saint Paul contrasts two covenants: one that would enslave us, and another that would set us free. The first covenant is based on the Law. The Law itself is not bad, the problem is that we fail to live by the Law, and therefore the Law condemns us. Those who are condemned are put in chains and ultimately face death. This is the inevitable fate of mankind, “for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”

This is why God offers us a new covenant – a covenant that sets us free. The basis of this new covenant is God’s promise to bestow the fullness of His blessing on those who, like Abraham, listen to Him and believe in Him. This covenant does not condemn us, but rather justifies us, because we have been paid for, we have been saved by God’s mercy, we have been “justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”

God loves us as His children, who are born not of the flesh but of the Spirit. Just as God is our Father, so is our mother the Church, whom Scripture compares to a bride adorned for Christ as her Bridegroom. Christ has entrusted to His Church the fullness of the means of grace: His Word and the holy Sacraments, the most important of which are Baptism and the Eucharist. Through Baptism we are born children of God, and through the Eucharist our Lord nourishes us day by day so that we may grow towards the salvation promised to us, in the freedom of the children of God.