Lent always leads to Easter
by Rev Dan Brown
My journey of faith began in the Lenten season immersed in the gothic sensibilities and sublimities of the cathedral. I am ever grateful to my Catholic friends who welcomed a poor atheist with an old acoustic guitar strapped to his back into their experience of grace. Ashes and oil left a lasting mark. The cantor sang haunting refrains of self-sacrifice and love. The prayers called for inward reflection and the homilies to outward reconciliation. The priests were serious in their practice and hopeful in their tone. Stone saints surrounded the living all under the anguished, sad, grieving, disappointed, understanding gaze of the Christ crucified. I remember walking the stations of the cross and witnessing the visceral portrayals of suffering in the midst of human cruelty. I felt the weight of the hammer and the sharpness of the thorns and imagined both the pain they would cause and the heart I would have to have to use them: a heart I could never have. A heart, at least I hoped, that I could never have.
This early immersion into a deeply contemplative and experiential observance of Lent was profoundly formative. This was my first time encountering a sacred space without feeling judgement for who I was or the many societal reasons I wasn’t worthy to be there. This was my first time feeling that the practice of religion was connected to something real and important. This was my first time ever contemplating that dying was not a vain end in the birth-death dichotomy: It was, instead, the first half of the pair.
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in and the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
- Galatians 2:20 (NIV, italics translation mine)
This is what we understand to be good news: the world of living and dying transformed into a world of dying and rising. I’ve had many years to reflect on what it was that drew me in those first steps towards faith. Truly the trappings of dying were important to see. The martyrdom that inspired empathy. The violence that revealed the inward truths of our nature. The self-sacrifice that spoke to service as the greater good. It was, however, the anticipation and hope that permeated the experience. The priest and the parish knowing the rest of the story while they honoured each step as they walked along. Cross and empty tomb. Lent always (!) leads to Easter.
This, to me, has always been the distinctive of ministry: that as practitioners of ritual and service we are guided by this great transformation toward life undeniable. This is certainly true as we find ourselves at the side of the dying. Some of us find ourselves with the young who are seeing death for the first time. Some of us are called when the diagnosis comes and there are hard days ahead. Some of us to the hospital bed and to final breaths. In this, our experience of the Lenten rhythm guides our presence, words, and tone in ways that change stone walls from crypt to cathedral.
There is something that I have learned in the gift of ministry. It’s that this great transformation isn’t reserved for the undiscovered country. Notice, from Paul, the gift of present tense. “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” There it is again: Lent giving rise to Easter. “I now live…” We honour this good news as clergy who baptize. The water is a symbol of entering the grave and emerging from it. Dying and rising. This becomes a guiding principle for all of the care that we offer. In counsel to those who are in conflict, we offer death to that which hates and destroys and life to forgiveness and hope. For those who are experiencing the weight of guilt, it dies with Jesus who loved and gave himself and rises in the opportunity to live anew. It is found even in the beauty of good into better as two leave what was behind and cleave to what God puts together in marriage.
The experience of Lent and Easter is good news in a world that often expresses so much bad news. Doubtless that as you are experiencing this season, dear colleagues, that your attention is drawn to the dying as the old order of things reasserts itself. This verse in Galatians finds itself in a context of community forgetting the great transformation and reverting to the old patterns of fear, control, power and death by rebuilding what was destroyed. We experience and guide the Lenten path as those who know that this is not the world we live in. We lament that world. We call for change in that world. We bear witness to the hearts that implement the tools of suffering. As we experience the present-day stations of the cross where Jesus is found with the hungry, the homeless, and the hated enemy, we lead others to the sacred spaces of empathy knowing that Lent always (!) leads to Easter.
You’ll notice that I’ve added to the translation of verse 20. The Greek here blends the dative and the genitive in ways that allow for both translations: faith in and faithfulness of. I believe that Paul is being deliberate in his confusion of the grammar. As I experience and lead people through the Lent and Easter seasons of life, it is always encouraging to observe the flourishing of a faith that embraces dying and rising as good news and grand transformation. It is all the more profound when that faith meets the faithfulness of Jesus who leads the way. Who gave himself and now lives in us. Dying and rising, indeed.
