Lent #2: Once and For All, To the End

My grand intentions of blogging regularly during Lent have been somewhat taken over by my attempt to write roughly one poem for each day of the season. This has been a difficult enough discipline by itself. I mentioned in my first Lent-related post for the year that I have not felt especially ready for Lent this year, and the feeling continues. Each morning as I work through John's narrative of the Passion, each evening as I work back over past chapters of John's Gospel to guide my poems, I find myself not wanting to think about this story that is at the very heart of my faith. Is this an normal enough experience? Perhaps, though I am grieved that this is the case for me. I wish I felt differently. I really do.

But all this serves to remind me of something that I badly need reminding of: that none of this is about me and what I can bring to God, not emotionally, not spiritually. It isn't about how disciplined or focused I can be during this season; it isn't about how much I grieve, how much I weep, how much I rejoice. It is about Jesus who died and rose again.

I am reminded of the letter to the Hebrews, which speaks of Jesus' death being sufficient in and of itself, with no need to be repeated, unlike the old sacrificial system which needed regular updating: "those sacrifices", the writer notes, "are an annual reminder of sins, because it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins" (Hebrews 10:3-4). But Jesus' death was enough, once for all time; it had the power to take away sins and not let them go back. It was this knowledge of what Jesus' death achieved, I think, that prompted the writer earlier to use the image of crucifying Jesus over and over again by falling away from God and trying to return to Him: "It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace." (Hebrews 6:4-6). Jesus' death was enough just once for the rest of time; why, then, would we want to receive His death, then give it up, then receive it again?

And I am reminded then of how in some cultures and traditions re-enactments of the crucifixion are a feature of this season, and I wonder how they understand the warnings against re-crucifying Christ, or the writer to the Hebrews' declaration that one crucifixion of Christ was enough for the rest of human history. And I wonder then if there is some vestige of this thinking in the way that I try to enact the right cycle of emotions each time, re-enacting the grief of crucifixion in some attempt to better attain its benefits.

There is rarely enough grief or mourning in how the Western evangelical church thinks about Lent. In some churches, Good Friday is just an awkward Other Easter Sunday; no-one really knows how to be mournful, so it becomes another celebration. But it is no better to swing too vehemently the other way, to make Lent into a sanctifying ritual of mourning. That puts the focus far too much on our own religious observance and far too little on the sufficiency of what Jesus did.

This Lent, I hope to learn to be more balanced. But, thank God, even if I don't succeed, His grace is sufficient for me. For His power is made perfect - amazingly - in our every weakness.