Thought for Ash Wednesday and the First Sunday of Lent: what is Lent for?

‘I don’t think Christ needed 40 days in the desert. A long weekend would have done. It would have made it a lot easier…’ The late Sir Jimmy Savile was quoted thus in a newspaper article in 1995 which proclaimed ‘the ritual of abstinence over Lent … has all but disappeared. The British public has given up on giving up.’

The dire warnings of nearly a decade ago may not have entirely been confirmed by events, because the Church of England announced this year that one in three churchgoers were planning to observe Lent, but almost up to the last minute 32% of them hadn’t made up their minds on what to give up or take up. Sadly only 9% of those interviewed were considering ‘doing something spiritual like praying [or] reading the Bible’. Giving up chocolate or other treats or doing more positive or kindly acts were much more popular (respectively 17% and 21%). Apparently men are twice as likely to give up alcohol for Lent, whereas women are nearly three times more likely to give up chocolate.

Our understanding of the purposes of Lent seems to have narrowed. If we contemplate the needs of the world, as Christian Aid asks us to do in their Count Your Blessings journey for Lent, we are already meditating and opening ourselves up to God in prayer. This is the essential purpose of Lent. For as the late Cardinal Basil Hume remarked, ‘Christ shared our experience; he suffered as we suffer; he died as we shall die, and for forty days in the desert he underwent the struggle between good and evil.’

Continuing with the words of the late Basil Hume, the devil seeks to take advantage of Christ’s hunger ‘to tempt him to limit his concern to the relief of human need. These are vital concerns; but they cannot be the sole concern of the Church. We need daily bread; we need too a reason for living, a sense of purpose, a vision. We need the bread of life, the word of truth which comes from God.’ And as the Cardinal also remarked, the blessings we receive in the joy of the Resurrected Christ on Easter morning rest on the quality of our Lenten journey up to and including Holy Week.

Mark’s gospel emphasises that after his baptism in the river Jordan, Jesus went off straight to the wilderness for his 40 days’ preparation for his earthly ministry. The Devil comes to tempt him, but Christ is clear in his response: ‘I don’t have to prove that I am worthy of love. I am the Beloved of God, the One on whom God’s favour rests.’ Though, unlike us, Jesus remained ‘without sin’, he was not immune from temptation. In that respect, critically, he shared our human condition. And remember, too, that like us, the challenge of temptation never entirely left him. As Luke comments at the end of his version of the story of the temptation in the wilderness: ‘having exhausted all these ways of tempting him, the devil left him, to return at the appointed (or opportune) time’ (Luke 4:13). We are most severely challenged when we are closest to God and most open to God: it is then that temptation seeks to come in via an open back door precisely because our defences are down.

Last Sunday's Thought: what are the limits to dialogue with the world?

‘He’s all things to all men.’ To be able to satisfy everyone’s needs. It’s a good thing. Yet so often in our society it’s taken the other way round. If we try to please everyone, we begin to realize that it is impossible to do this. In this world, we can’t possibly keep everyone happy and we’ve just got to realize that we can’t be all things to all men. So much so that sometimes even the attempt to please all people is derided.

 ‘To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, so that I might by any means save some’ (1 Cor 9:22). If we were to isolate this passage from the rest of Scripture we might assume that Paul was willing to do anything to reach the lost, including adopting their lifestyle and compromising his ethics, morals and beliefs. If we use this logic then we cannot reach a drug addict unless we become one, we cannot reach a drunkard unless we drink alcohol in excess and so on. The notion that the church must become like the world to win the world has taken some areas of American evangelicalism by storm. Virtually every modern worldly attraction has a ‘Christian’ counterpart. There are Christian motorcycle gangs, Christian bodybuilding teams, Christian dance clubs, Christian amusement parks, and even Christian nudist colonies.

Paul was no encyclopaedia salesman for the Christian message. His purpose was evangelism, to catch souls. He wrote, ‘Am I now seeking the favour of men, or of God? Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a bond-servant of Christ’ (Gal.1:10). Paul preached the gospel exactly as he had received it directly from the Lord, and he always delivered that message ‘as of first importance’ (1 Cor. 15:3). He was unwilling to remove the offence from the gospel (Gal. 5:11). If the message was an offence, so be it: ‘We preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block, and to Gentiles foolishness’ (1 Cor. 1:23). But Paul would not make himself a stumbling block to unbelievers: ‘Give no offence either to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God’ (10:32).

All of which carries with it important messages for ministry today as we seek to engage with non-Churchgoers and the non-Christian world, particularly in our services of baptism and funeral services. The design of church-growth strategies is to attract the unchurched. In principle this is good. But how effectively is this done? There has to be genuine Christian discipleship, and discipleship in depth. Hence the importance of small groups in Church, where all can explore the faith in depth. In Church itself, our priority must be the straightforward, Christ-centred proclamation of the unadulterated Word of God. Otherwise, as in Isaiah 53:1, the danger is that we return home crying out, ‘Who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?’ (cf. John 12:38).