Monday Invocation | Lenten Series: Steadfast Love
“For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed, says the Lord, who has compassion on you.” (Isaiah 54:10 NRSV)
Throughout Scripture, we find abundant references to the love of God. Even in texts rendering God’s judgment against oppression and exploitation, the reality of God’s love persists. Written by the prophet Isaiah in the midst of Babylonian captivity, this passage reminded its readers that their experience of occupation would not undermine God’s promise of peace and liberation.
In this passage’s original context, Isaiah records God as conveying: This is temporary—I’m here, and I’m with you. You are not forgotten, and you are not abandoned. God does not promise to immediately fix or solve the situation. Rather, the promise is presence: “[I] shall not depart from you.”
Perhaps you’ve experienced the opposite of steadfast love. Maybe you’re all too familiar with the absence of love or “love” that is made conditional, hollow, or harmful.
For so many LGBTQ+ Christians, naming an identity other than heterosexual and cisgender has carried significant cost. Rejection, abandonment, isolation, spiritual harm—these horrible outcomes fall far short of the steadfast love embodied in the life, death, and resurrection of the Incarnate Christ. Rather than being shown the open arms of a generous Creator, so many LGBTQ+ people are faced with shut doors, closed minds, and hard hearts.
This is not the love about which Isaiah testified to hurting people. It is not the love John clearly states that God personifies. And it is certainly not the love to which Jesus bore witness.
In this season of Lent, we reflect on Jesus’s life in ways that, 2,000 years later, challenge us. He faced unimaginable suffering with surety in his calling, knowing that what was before him was greater, and that God’s love was unflinching.
When Jesus asked God for deliverance from what was to come, he was steadfast.
When betrayed, arrested, and charged by the Empire, he was steadfast.
When mocked by the crowd as he hung on the cross, he was steadfast.
When he experienced an isolation greater than any human has ever known, the living Christ embodied the steadfast, perfect, relentless love of God, surrendering his spirit into God’s hands. And on the third day, this same love overcame death, demonstrating once and for all that—as Paul writes in his letter to the Romans—nothing can separate us from God’s love.
Through today’s text, the Spirit invites us to remember: God’s “steadfast love shall not depart from you.” Even in our suffering, we are invited to know God calls us Their beloved children, wholly and completely affirmed. May we each experience the fullness of God's steadfast love, and may we in turn love our neighbors as we love ourselves.
