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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Serie: Fullness of Time
- Sprache: Englisch
Christianity Today Book Award Finalist—Bible and Devotional "Lent is inescapably about repenting." Every year, the church invites us into a season of repentance and fasting in preparation for Holy Week. It's an invitation to turn away from our sins and toward the mercy and grace of Christ. Often, though, we experience the Lenten fast as either a mindless ritual or self-improvement program. In this short volume, priest and scholar Esau McCaulley introduces the season of Lent, showing us how its prayers and rituals point us not just to our own sinfulness but also beyond it to our merciful Savior. Each volume in the Fullness of Time series invites readers to engage with the riches of the church year, exploring the traditions, prayers, Scriptures, and rituals of the seasons of the church calendar.
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This book is dedicated to my wife, Mandy.
It is my great joy to journey through the church yearand life with you as we pursue Christ together.
Contents
The Fullness of Time
SERIES PREFACE
Christians of all traditions are finding a renewed appreciation for the church year. This is evident in the increased number of churches that mark the seasons in their preaching and teaching. It’s evident in the families and small groups looking for ways to recover ancient practices of the Christian faith. This is all very good. To assist in this renewal, we thought Christians might find it beneficial to have an accessible guide to the church year, one that’s more than a devotional but less than an academic tome.
The Fullness of Time project aims to do just that. We have put together a series of short books on the seasons and key events of the church year, including Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. These books are reflections on the moods, themes, rituals, prayers, and Scriptures that mark each season.
These are not, strictly speaking, devotionals. They are theological and spiritual reflections that seek to provide spiritual formation by helping the reader live fully into the practices of each season. We want readers to understand how the church is forming them in the likeness of Christ through the church calendar.
These books are written from the perspective of those who have lived through the seasons many times, and we’ll use personal stories and experiences to explain different aspects of the season that are meaningful to us. In what follows, do not look for comments from historians pointing out minutiae. Instead, look for fellow believers and evangelists using the tool of the church year to preach the gospel and point Christians toward discipleship and spiritual formation. We pray that these books will be useful to individuals, families, and churches seeking a deeper walk with Jesus.
We Must Repent
AN INTRODUCTION TO LENT
“The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”
Lent is inescapably about repenting. Repentance is a change in direction, a Spirit-empowered turning around. Repentance, then, is the first step we make toward God. But to turn toward God we must turn away from something else. That something else is our sins.
Lent, then, is about turning away from our sins and toward the living God. A season dedicated to repentance and renewal should not lead us to despair; it should cause us to praise God for his grace. Central to Lent is the idea that we need this kind of renewal consistently throughout our lives. We do not receive God’s grace only when we turn to him at the beginning of our spiritual journey. God’s grace meets us again and again.
Repentance solves the crisis created by our initial encounter with the gospel and its central character: the Messiah Jesus. Therefore, we cannot begin to discuss what Lent is until we do a little more to outline the shape of repentance.
When Peter preached that first sermon at Pentecost, the Scripture says his hearers were “cut to the heart” and asked, “What shall we do?” (Acts 2:37). Peter told them they must repent. The proclamation of the gospel and the realization that it tells the story of God’s work through his Son’s life, death, and resurrection creates a crisis. When we enter the presence of God, no one has to convince us of our sinfulness. We learn about our inadequacy by the contrast between ourselves and God’s holiness.
When I encountered Jesus, I knew I was in the presence not merely of a better person but of a different category of being altogether, the God-Man. We see the inadequacy of our former way of life in the light of the holiness of God’s Son.
This is why this same apostle, when he first glimpsed Jesus during the miraculous catch of fish, said, “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:8). It’s why Isaiah, when he encountered the presence of God, could only cry, “Woe to me!” (Isaiah 6:5).
The good news is that at the moment we see the gap between ourselves and our Lord, we also encounter the blood that draws us in and assures us we are forgiven. Jesus’ own presence is both grace and judgment.
I don’t remember much about what led me to be baptized at an early age, but I do remember the feeling of dread that came over me then, and many other times over the years. It’s a dread that has come over all those who come to Jesus. It’s the thrill and the terror that the story of Jesus—his life, death, resurrection, ascension, and eventual return—is true. If these things are true, everything is turned upside down. The life we have known is ended; something new has begun. God help us, we must change direction. We must repent.
While repentance is required of new followers of Jesus making their first steps toward God, it is also the means by which all followers of Jesus start again when we have failed. Luther begins his famous Ninety-Five Theses by saying, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ (Matthew 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”1 The goal of beginning again and beginning for the first time is the same. We are seeking communion with the risen Lord.
Lent is a season of repentance and preparation. In many churches, it is a time when those who will be baptized prepare for their new life with God. It is a time when those who have been estranged from the church can be reconciled to the body of believers. It is also a time for all of us to think about the ways we have drifted from the faith. The common theme uniting these three functions of Lent is that they all involve a turning toward God with intention and reflection on the past.
We hope that as Christians we mature and grow and become more and more like Christ. But the church in its wisdom assumes we will fail, even after our baptism. The church presumes that life is long and zeal fades, not just for some of us but for all. So it has included within its life a season in which all of us can recapture our love for God and his kingdom and cast off those things that so easily entangle us.
Today Lent is observed as forty days of fasting in preparation for Easter. In the West, Lent begins on Ash Wednesday and concludes on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter. Exactly how we ended up with this period of time is something of a mystery. In the first few centuries of the church’s life, believers observed a one- or two-day fast in preparation for Easter. Some scholars think this fast was eventually extended to what we now call Holy Week. We went from a few days to a week of preparation. One week grew to three weeks and eventually to forty days. During those forty days, baptismal candidates were prepared to be received into the church on Easter.2
As best we can tell, however, the fasts related to Holy Week developed apart from what is now called Lent. It seems there was a period of fasting that preceded baptism even when the baptism was not connected with Easter.3 Those fasts varied in length, but there is some evidence that the forty-day pre-baptismal fast was popular in Alexandria.
However Lent precisely developed, it’s clear the early Christians thought baptism was serious and required preparation. I think this is wise. Becoming a Christian is no small matter. To transition from believing you live in a world where death is the end, to one in which an almighty God calls dead things to life, is much more significant than choosing what to have for breakfast. We should have space to reflect on the full significance of the change.
After the Council of Nicaea set a particular date for the celebration of Easter, many throughout the church began to see the Feast of the Resurrection as the best time to bring people into the church. It was also a fitting time to bring back those who had strayed. The link between Lent and Easter then was a collision of different factors. The season of fasting linked to baptism and the reconciliation of those estranged from the church were connected to the fasting undertaken in preparation for Easter, including Holy Week.
So Lent came to be about three things: the preparation of new converts for baptism, the reconciliation of those estranged from the church, and a general call for the whole church to repent and renew its commitment to Jesus.
In those early centuries, the practice varied. In the East, the Lenten fast lasted seven weeks, but Saturdays and Sundays weren’t counted in the total, so there were actually only thirty-six fast days.4 In the West, the fast was only six weeks, but they too ended up with thirty-six days because Sundays were not counted.5 Western Christians eventually added the four days from Ash Wednesday to the First Sunday of Lent to give us the number forty. Today in most Western churches the days of Lent are calculated by counting forty days from Ash Wednesday through the end of Holy Week, excluding Sundays.
Fasting practices also differed. In some contexts particular foods were removed from the diet during Lent; in others the number of meals was reduced. This might seem like the kind of creeping legalism that sends Protestants running for the hills. But hold on.
All this variation is actually freeing. There is no single way to observe Lent given from on high that we must follow to be right with God. The history of Lent is like our spiritual lives. The church stumbled around trying different things in order to discern the best ways to use this time to grow closer to God. We should not see the season of Lent as a series of rules but as a gift of the collected wisdom of the church universal. It is one of many tools of discipleship pointing us toward a closer walk with Jesus.
This does not mean we should treat Lent as a spiritual buffet to pick and choose from arbitrarily. It means we should take the wisdom the church offers as just that—wisdom. There may be some benefit to adopting practices that don’t initially make sense to us because Christians before us have struggled, discerned, and prayed their way into the traditions that are now our heritage.
I was not baptized at the end of Lent. I was raised in the Black Baptist church, where we got baptized when we heard the gospel and believed. But Lent does hold a particular place in my heart. The season of Lent was my first encounter with liturgical spirituality. It added a new element to my spiritual life.
My first Lent was a pilgrimage. I did not leave the city I resided in, but I did go on a journey. At a time when I felt adrift spiritually, Lent helped me become aware of the nearness of God. These outward practices took me on an inward journey further into the awareness of God.
That is the purpose of all of this. In this series of books on the liturgical seasons, we aren’t trying to lay further burdens on the backs of Christians or pretend we’ve figured out the only way to please God. Instead, these are notes on an encounter that is available to all.
What follows is an attempt to point out the things I’ve seen along the way. It is not just an explanation of Lent but an invitation to experience it, a chance to meet our risen Lord who always runs just ahead of us, beckoning us forward.
1
Facing Death, Finding Hope
ASH WEDNESDAY
Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.
A
