| In Praise of Lent and Holy Week | | Print | |
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Dean DeLiza Spangler, St. Paul's Cathedral
The writer Philip Yancey recounts that a colleague of W.C. Fields once
caught the self-professed agnostic reading the Bible. "Embarrassed,
Fields snapped the book shut and explained, ‘Just looking for
loopholes.'" "Probably," Yancey comments, "he was looking for grace."
(What's So Amazing about Grace, p. 35) Lent and Holy Week are a great gift to us and yet are so easily misunderstood. At one time or another, we may have heard—or even said ourselves—that Ash Wednesday is only about sin and death, or Lent is about engaging in Lenten disciplines that will win God's forgiveness and eternal gratitude, or Holy Week is depressing. The great gifts the Church gives us in this season are so easily turned into sorrowful burdens. Ash Wednesday, which this year falls on February 6, begins the season of Lent. While the ashes imposed on our foreheads do remind us of our sinfulness and our mortality, they are imposed in the shape of a cross— a reminder that by God's grace, we are more than dust and ashes. Ash Wednesday and Lent as a whole are about discovering that, through God's forgiveness and love, "we are dust that is full of mystery, to be changed and transfigured into God's own likeness." (Michael Mayne, Pray, Love, Remember, p. 3) During the season of Lent, we often speak of "Lenten disciplines," about taking on or giving up something for Lent, but these disciplines are not something we do for God. They are things we do for ourselves to help open us more fully to an awareness of God's presence. Lenten disciplines aren't about earning God's forgiveness and love. They're about doing whatever we can to accept the forgiveness and love that is already there, a forgiveness and love that will change and transfigure us. Whether it's giving up something or taking on something, like a special area of study, the point is to open us more fully to God. Sometimes people will complain that, in Lent, we spend time focusing on our sins when, since God has forgiven us for them, why bother? Aren't we just groveling around in something already forgiven? Lent is about acknowledging our sins, but it's not about groveling in them. God in Christ has forgiven our sins, but we cannot truly accept that forgiveness—or even our need for it—if we cannot first acknowledge our sinfulness. Acknowledging our sins isn't an end in itself. It opens us to receive the strength and forgiveness to move on with our lives. And Holy Week is anything but "depressing." It is, rather, a week of powerful liturgies evoking deep and profound gratitude on our part. Holy Week makes clear how far God is willing to go to get his children back. God in Christ willingly entered the darkness of death and the grave to convey to us that nothing can destroy his love for us or separate us from him. Lent isn't about what we do for God, but what God has done—and continues to do—for us in Christ; a season that isn't about groveling in our sins, or making ourselves worthy or getting by with something, but about a life lived in the strength of God's love and forgiveness. For our faith is not about loopholes; it's about grace. |
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