So its Lent. I mean, more specifically its Holy Week, and nearly at the end of Holy Week, we've come to Good Friday. Its amazing what happens this time of the year. At Christmas, we celebrate the Nativity, an event that we recognize in our actions and thoughts. Just so the other parts of the church year. The liturgical year follows the life of Christ, and the different stages of his earthly life and ministry are easy enough to acknowledge through devotional emphasis, whether it be the mystery of his birth, the glory of his Transfiguration, the majesty of his ascension, or the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost by his promise. All these events we participate in primarily through a sort of mental and spiritual acknowledgment. Lent is different. Holy Week is different. Easter is different.
Part of the benefit of smart friends is scavenging their intelligent posts. A friend of mine posted a bit from her priest recently. I think its worth quoting:
Again the cross is brought out in procession, and that unique week of weeks approaches when the church invites us not so much to examine and to discuss, but to silently and intensely follow each step of Christ, to follow his slow and irreversible path to suffering, to crucifixion, and to death. It invites us to pick up this very cross.
As a pastor from my synod put it, this week encompasses the whole drama of our faith, the death, burial, and resurrection of that which was from the beginning. Lent is something different from the rest of the year, and Holy Week from the rest of Lent, most especially (I think, anyway) because in it we're actually invited to participate in this moment in the life of our Lord in a unique way. Of course, each part of the church year could easily be a metynomy for the whole of our faith if understood correctly, but Holy Week more than the rest.
Lent is strange for Lutherans, I think. On one hand we've got a good bit of practice. After all, saying that we're "poor miserable sinners" is part of the penitential rite that opens our services, the rite that happens immediately before Divine Service begins. On the other, we're the folks who hammer on the distinction between Law and Gospel. So a season where we're told to look at ourselves, to be awed by the burden of sin and the weight of glory, to repent for our deeds in the hope that we do not return to them to be builders of that which we've destroyed, has a foreign feel for us. We generally don't talk in church about the need to "do better this week" since our services focus on what Christ has done for us rather than what we do for him. Of course, the sinner's justification -salvation by Grace Alone through Faith Alone- need not create a tension. But, in all honesty, sometimes it does. Talk of right praxis is often met with the accusation of "pietist" and the conversation goes sour.
Lent does something to transcend all this in that it embodies the call of Christ. It begins with God speaking through a small man in front of me, saying "remember, oh man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." He puts ashes on my head marking me with the most despised and glorious of all marks: the command to remember is coupled with the sign of the cross. And at that moment, there is the call. This call cannot be parsed into law and gospel, into condemnation or forgiveness. It is the very voice of Christ calling me to repent, to believe, to turn. The next 40 days are the playing out again of a call, a call to fasting, repentance, and charity. Speaking through that little man at the altar, God himself calls us to follow him. The very word "remember" is a command, but repentance is nothing more than remembering both what we have done and what Christ has done and will continue to do for us.
Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship describes it like this when talking about the call of Christ on a man:
"And as he passed by he saw Levi, the son of Alphaes, sitting at the place of toll, and he saith unto him, Follow me. And he arose and followed him" (Mark 2:14).
The call goes forth, and is at once followed by the response of obedience. The response of the disciples is an act of obedience, not a confession of faith in Jesus. How could the call immediately invoke obedience?.... For the simple reason that the cause behind the immediate following of call by response is Jesus Christ himself.... According to our text, there is no road to faith or discipleship, no other road -only obedience to the call of Jesus.... It is a gracious call, a gracious commandment. It transcends the difference between the law and the gospel. Christ calls, the disciple follows: that is grace and commandment in one.
Long quote, I know, but I think it explains what I'm trying to say about Lent. It begins with this call of repentance and the turning of life from light to darkness. Last month, we began by following behind Christ as he fasted. This week saw us follow behind his donkey waving palms during his jubilant procession to the cross. And then, after his triumphal entry, our participation becomes more passive as the words of the gospel spoken to us wrap around our ears and hearts and bring us into the very story. We follow as a young John and a trembling Mary did, listening as the readings bring us, as the first utterance of those words brought them, to his trial, to his beatings, and finally to his death and burial. And we remember, as we do whenever we think of our baptism, that our God walked the road before us, showing all that it might bring. His resurrection is ours, but so is his cross. So is his tomb.
Holy Week is not so much about pondering or explaining doctrine. No, it "invites us not so much to examine and to discuss, but to silently and intensely follow each step of Christ." We do this always, or at least we're called to. During Holy Week, I guess, the reality of this call is just so much clearer because all we can do is simply follow, watch, and wait.
Different churches have different Good Friday traditions. Our church has a Tenebrae service. Psalms and gospels readings follow the Crucifixion and burial of Christ as the lights are slowly snuffed out, just as the Light that lighteth all men appeared, for a moment in time, to be blown out. The sun turned away, the earth shook, and we stand in darkness as those last remaining disciples did, until we hear that resounding crack that shook their hearts when the stone closed the grave in a poor mockery of "immensity cloistered." And as we stand, a single lit candle is brought out from behind the altar, and as we leave it reminds us that, though the story may have stopped flowing over our hearts, it has not yet come to an end.
And so we call this Friday Good. This week, we learn anew year after year that all our study, all our good works, all our striving and understanding, even all our penitence, come down to hearing the call, leaving the place of toll, and walking after that Jesus who existed from the beginning, who knew from all eternity the road he would travel, and who invites us in these moments to realize that we too must walk it behind him. The road may not be the one we'd like it to be. Worse still, it may be something like the one he trod. But Christ himself has called us to it. We walk it in faith, knowing that, while our humiliation along the way may bring us to our own Golgotha, He is strong and faithful to pull us along the final steps and across the threshold of glory.
Even after Tenebrae, the candle burns at the altar.
