Quinquagesima, 2011
Topical
The Rev. Jerry Kistler
St. Stephen’s Reformed
Episcopal Church
“The Journey to Easter”
The following advertisement once appeared in a
What makes a journey like that such an attractive thing for so many? Well I think there are three things. First, there’s a cost involved in making the journey. There’s a difficulty that makes the journey valuable. It’s like that line from the movie “A League of Their Own,” where Tom Hanks’ character says about the game of baseball, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it was easy everybody would be doing it. It’s the hard that makes it great.”
Well second, there’s got to be some hope of achieving the
goal. There’s got to be some hope, however miniscule, of making it to the pole
and back again. There’s got to be some hope that you’ll make it to the top of
the mountain and back down; that you have the skill, you have the strength, you
have the determination, to complete the quest, where everybody may have failed before
you. You can do it.
And then third, there has to be an expectation that your achievement
of the goal, your completion of the difficult journey, will bring a new status
or a new condition to your life, an elevation in the way you view yourself and the
way you’re viewed by others. Ernest Shackleton became
Sir Ernest Shackleton
on the completion of his voyage. Edmund Hillary became Sir Edmund Hillary after
becoming the first man to
So there’s a cost involved which makes the journey great. There’s got to be some hope of achieving the goal. And there has to be an expectation that the achievement of the goal will bring with it a new status or condition to your life.
Well, all of this ought to describe for us the journey that we call the season of Lent—the journey to Easter—because that’s the kind of difficult, costly, hopeful journey Lent is designed to be. As the late great Russian Orthodox priest, Alexander Schmemann once said, Lent is “spiritual journey whose purpose is to transfer us from one spiritual state into another.” It is “a spiritual journey and its destination is Easter, ‘the Feast of Feasts.’ It is the preparation for the ‘fulfillment of Pascha [the Passover], the true Revelation.”
Unfortunately for so many of us, we’ve grown up thinking about Lent as merely a time when we’re supposed to give up something we enjoy very much, or to spend more time in prayer, or to live more charitably. Or we’ve thought of it as a special time to imitate the forty days and nights of abstinence and self-denial our Lord spent in the wilderness. And all of this is important and good. But because we’ve basically lost the idea of Lent as a journey which has a specific goal, we’ve come to think of it as a time to do our religious obligations for the sake of doing our religious obligations. We need to recapture the vision of Lent as a pilgrimage, where we set out with the goal of entering in once again to the Paschal mysteries—the new life we have in the death and resurrection and ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ.
But in trying to recapture that vision, we ought to pause for a moment to consider how Lent actually came together in the first place, and how it became a part of the life of the universal Church so many centuries ago. Lent, as the forty day season that we’ve come to know it as, developed in the fourth century from three merging sources.
The first was the ancient Paschal fast that began as a two-day observance before Easter but which, over many years, gradually lengthened to forty days as the imitation of Christ’s forty-day fast in the wilderness merged with it. So that’s the first source: the ancient Paschal fast.
The second source was the process of preparation for baptism called the catechumenate—a three-year process, the final stage of which was an intense period of preparation in the form of instruction, prayer, fasting, and exorcism, in the time that we now know as Lent. And upon the completion of this time of preparation, the catechumen would be brought to the font on the Vigil of Easter—Easter Even—to be initiated into the new life of Christ. That’s the second source of Lent: the catechumenate.
The third source for the development of Lent was the order of Penitents, which was modeled after the catechumenate, and which sought a renewal of conversion for those who had fallen into grievous sin after baptism. On Ash Wednesday the penitents prostrated themselves on the pavement of the church, and the bishop put ashes on their foreheads, saying, “Remember, O man, you are dust, and to dust you will return. Do penance [or produce the fruits of repentance] and you will have eternal life.” Then the penitents were clothed with sackcloth and prostrated themselves before the whole assembly as the bishop preached a sermon on Adam’s expulsion from the garden, after which he led them to the door of the church. And as they knelt outside, the bishop exhorted them “not to despair of the Lord’s mercy but devote themselves to fasting, to prayer, to pilgrimages, to almsgiving and to other good works, so that the Lord may lead you to the worthy fruit of true repentance.” After that their forty days of penance they were restored to Communion on Easter morning.
And so as the catechumens entered their final period of preparation for Baptism, and as the penitents strove to be restored to their place among the baptized, the whole Christian community began to identify with both groups, and began to accompany them on their journey to renew their own baptismal vows on Easter. That’s how these three sources—the Paschal fast, the Catechumenate, and the order of penitents—gave us Lent as we know it today, as that forty-day period of penitence and preparation and training that it has become.
But the important thing to see is how each of these three sources looked to Easter as the goal of the process of conversion, or the renewal of one’s conversion, in Christ. That’s the point of Lent. That’s how Lent is a journey to a new status, or a renewed status, in your Christian life. You see, conversion in not something that happens to us just once and for all time; it’s a process that must continue our whole lives through repenting and turning away from our sins, and being renewed in the grace of God. Conversion means leaving behind an old way of living and acting in order to embrace a new way of living in Christ. And Lent, as our journey to Easter, as our journey to enter in once again to the mysteries of our redemption, is a time for us to focus our energies on being renewed in our conversion.
So I like again how Alexander Schmemann puts it. He says,
“On Easter we celebrate Christ’s
Resurrection as something that happened and still happens to us. For each one of us received the gift of that new life and
the power to accept it and to live by it. It is a gift which radically alters
our attitude toward everything in this world, including death. It makes it
possible for us joyfully to affirm: ‘Death is no more!’ Oh, death is still
there, to be sure, and we still face it and someday it will come and take us.
But it is our whole faith that by His own death Christ changed the very nature
of death, made it a passage—a ‘passover,’ a ‘Pascha’—into the
“Such is the faith of the Church, affirmed and made evident by her countless Saints. Is it not our daily experience, however, that this faith is very seldom ours, that all the time we lose and betray the ‘new life’ which we received as a gift, and that in fact we live as if Christ did not rise from the dead, as if that unique event had no meaning whatsoever for us?... We simply forget all this—so busy are we, so immersed in our daily preoccupations—and because we forget, we fail. And through this forgetfulness, failure, and sin, our life becomes ‘old’ again—petty, dark and ultimately meaningless—a meaningless journey toward a meaningless end. We manage to forget even death and then, all of a sudden, in the midst of our ‘enjoying life’ it come to us: horrible, inescapable, senseless. We may from time to time acknowledge and confess our various ‘sins,’ yet we cease to refer our life to that new life which Christ revealed and gave to us. Indeed, we live as if He never came. This is the only real sin, the sin of all sins, the bottomless sadness and tragedy of our nominal Christianity.
“If
we realized this, then we may understand what Easter is and why it needs and
presupposes Lent. For we may then understand that the liturgical traditions of
the Church, all its cycles and services, exist, first of all, in order to help
us recover the vision and the taste of that new
life which we so easily lose and betray, so that we may repent and return
to it” (Great Lent; Journey to Pascha, pp. 12-13).
So where do we begin? Well, our journey begins this Wednesday. Ash Wednesday begins the process that ends at Easter, for to prepare well for that Day we must die, must die now to sin and to be raised again to new life in Christ. As another has put it, “Being marked with ashes at the beginning of Lent indicates our recognition of the need for a deeper conversion of our lives during this season of renewal.” In a very real sense the journey begins with a death and ends with a rebirth.
But like it is on every journey, in order to arrive at our destination, there are things we need to take with us, and there are things we need to leave behind. This is where the disciplines of fasting and abstinence, on the one hand, and the disciplines of prayer and study and alms-giving, on the other, fit into the picture. These are the things that help us along on our journey, or the things that we need to lay aside for a time so as not to become barriers to our journey.
For once again, the Lenten journey is a journey to baptism, or to a renewal in our baptism. For in baptism we went down into death with Christ, that we might be raise with Him into new life. Paul says in Romans, “Do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:3-4).
And so to quote Schmemann once again, “Even when the Church rarely baptized adults and the institution of the catechumenate disappeared, the basic meaning of Lent remained the same. For even though we are baptized, what we constantly lose and betray is precisely that which we received at Baptism. Therefore Easter is our return every year to our own Baptism, whereas Lent is our preparation for that return—the slow and sustained effort to perform, at the end, our own ‘passage’ or ‘pascha’ into the new life in Christ.”
This is the Lenten journey. This is the journey to Easter that begins this Wednesday. My praery for you is that you will embrace that journey; that you will embrace the difficulty of the journey which makes it valuable, which makes it great; that you will make the journey with hope that you’ll achieve your goal, and that, achieving your goal, you’ll arrive at a new level in your spiritual life, a renewal in your conversion in Christ. May God bless us on our journey. +