Mortification
Propers: Ash Wednesday, AD 2024 B
Homily:
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Death and resurrection: that’s what Lent is all about. In many ways, that’s what Christianity is all about.
Once upon a time, following Jesus could get you killed. Jewish Christians could be stoned for confessing Jesus not only as the Christ but as God incarnate, God-With-Us. Gentile Christians faced execution for refusing to acknowledge the supremacy of the Roman imperial cult. You could worship whom you wished so long as Caesar got his due, his ritual pinch of incense.
Most believers, if they just kept their heads down and their mouths shut, could likely go about their lives with a minimum of molestation. But the prominent folks—bishops, catechists, those of saintly stripe—the state would make into examples. Certain modern scholars have criticized early Christian martyrologies for their supposed exaggerations, leaving one to wonder just how many of a group’s leadership have to be tortured and publicly executed in order for said group to claim aggrieved status.
You might think that, given these difficulties, these traumas, no-one in their right mind would want to join the Christian church. But just the opposite appears to have been the case. Even assuming grossly inflated numbers, it’s clear that the church grew quickly and broadly, starting amongst the lower echelons of imperial society—women, slaves, Jews—then spreading rapidly across classes and ethnicities.
Nor was this due to ease of entry. The church played many of her cards close to the vest in those days. Most anyone was welcome to worship for the first part of the liturgy: reading the Scriptures, hearing the homily, chanting the prayers. But for that second part, following the sharing of the peace, anyone not yet baptized had to leave. Christians reserved the Eucharist for themselves. Some, like St John, would not speak nor write of it openly. The sacrament, the mystery, had to be experienced for oneself.
The process of formation leading up to Holy Baptism took years in the Christian East. The catechumenate, those preparing for their baptisms, spent this time in reading, prayer, fasting, and good works. The Christian West sped up the process considerably. We always were a bit more practical. 40 days it took to prepare a catechumen in the West: 40 days, not including Sundays, for the day of Resurrection is always a festival, never a fast.
That number, 40, reoccurs throughout the length and breadth of the Bible. Noah knew 40 days and 40 nights of rain. Moses’ life neatly divides into three periods of 40 years. The Israelites wandered 40 years in the wilderness. And Jesus Christ spent 40 days in the desert, tempted by the devil. One might ask, why 40? And the answer proves to be rather straightforward.
Ancient peoples knew that it takes roughly 40 weeks for a pregnant woman to come to term. Thus, the number 40 consistently signifies a time of pain and growth and hardship culminating in new life, new birth. The old dies and the new is born, yet the new is also the old reborn. Death and resurrection.
Having completed their 40-day preparatory pilgrimage, the catechumenate would then be baptized at the Great Vigil of Easter, the Christian Passover celebration. For us, every Sunday is a little Easter, while Easter itself is Sunday for the year. We are joined to Jesus’ Passover from death to life: to His death, already died for us, that we need never fear death again; and to His own eternal life, already begun.
Today we call this season Lent, a middle English term for spring, the lengthening of days. We observe it in solidarity with those preparing for Holy Baptism, walking with them to the Cross and empty Tomb, to be reborn and resurrected at the Easter Vigil. By this we reaffirm and renew our own baptism into Christ, not in that it needs to be redone—for it is the promise of God, and God does not break promises—but in that we ever need the Resurrection. We ever need to die unto our sins, our selves, our egos, and to rise anew in Jesus Christ, each and every day.
In Him, there is always forgiveness. In Him, there is always new life. Such is His power. For “when I am lifted up from the earth,” as He promised, “I will draw everyone unto Me.”
This day, in particular, we remember our mortality. We repent in ashes, eschewing celebratory things and fleshly indulgences. We remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. It is of course humbling to remember our death, but also to affirm our hope. The grave is not our end. Christ has gone before us; Christ has conquered death; Christ has harrowed hell, and hallowed Heaven to receive us! In Him, the tomb is now become our gate to immortality. Yes, we shall all die. And in dying, we all shall rise.
The question then becomes how to live our resurrection. What does it look like, when men and women are freed from sin and death and guilt and grave? It looks like Lent. Jesus instructs us in Matthew’s Gospel to give and to fast and to pray; and to do these things not for personal gain, not for public spectacle, but in order to live out our love for God by loving all of our neighbors.
In other words, we do not give or fast or pray in order to earn the love of God. His love is freely given, poured out from His riven side! Rather, fasting and praying and giving are our salvation, our response to Jesus’ love. We fast to know that man does not live by bread alone, and to understand that ever craving more than we truly need is itself a sort of slavery, a kind of living death. We give because God is love, and we must discern His face in our neighbor. All of us are part of Christ’s Body, all of us children of God. In giving to others, we give to ourselves.
And we pray, not because God needs our prayers, but because we need our God. To know Him in every moment, every object, every living thing; to understand that in Him we all live and move and have our being; this is what makes us truly human. We forever strive for the infinite, the eternal, the transcendent. But we settle for poor substitutes: possessions and pleasures and powers. All of us are born with a God-sized hole inside, and nothing can possibly fill it, except the love of God.
Thus when we pray we are sated, freed from the false food of spiritual impoverishment and poison. It’s not about granting wishes, for God is not a genie. It’s about the deeper reality, the Image of God within. And it’s about faith: which is nothing other than trust that God is the Good and the True and the Beautiful; and that all of the pains, which we suffer in this life, will vanish in the fire of His Spirit at the last.
There shall be time for feasting. There shall be time for joy. But what is a feast, if it’s all that we’ve known, and we haven’t the stomach to fast? What is joy if we can’t acknowledge sorrow, or a life that never faces its own end?
Lent is the little death, the little sacrifice, the little fast. It is an athletic dimension of faith, a discipline which liberates. For as a weightlifter trains with little weights, to be strong when it really counts, so Christians give and fast and pray, so that in the time of crisis we’re prepared to be God’s saints, to live in faith and die in hope and rise in Jesus Christ.
We have His Word and His Spirit. We have His Body and Blood. We have His death and Resurrection burning in our souls. Come and be renewed in the waters. Come and die to rise again.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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