MANUFACTURING GUILT

Saturday after the Fourth Sunday in Lent

Passiontide, the last two weeks of Lent, begins Sunday. In many churches, the statues, crosses and pictures throughout the church are veiled. The Gloria Patri is customarily laid aside until Easter Day. Our Lenten focus is changing. Up until Passiontide, Lent emphasizes those spiritual disciplines we’ve discussed—prayer, fasting and almsgiving—as they relate to our spiritual growth. Lent is a penitential time because when we think about our spiritual lives, we can’t escape the fact that we’re sinners. The lessons of Lent are lessons about our spiritual growth, our following Jesus in His desert discipline.

Passiontide shifts our attention. Now we look to Jesus, “the author and finisher of our faith,” Who gave Himself “for us men and for our salvation.” During these two weeks the Church turns our gaze to the death of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Finally, we can trot out the real guilt, huh? Suffering and death—the morose fixation on How Much Jesus Suffered For Us—even people who have only a glancing knowledge of Christianity know about this part. We’re all supposed to feel sorry because Jesus suffered, and remember He suffered and died for me because I’m bad. Many Christian denominations build their message on little more: “You’re a sinner; Jesus suffered for you; repent and be saved. Now you’re on the Road to Heaven.” Dime-store Christianity.

The One Church, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic says something different: we are sinners; God became a man to reshape our humanity. He calls us to lives of grace-wherein He lives in us and we in Him-with the intention of making us perfect. Salvation is not simply escaping hell. That’s a pathetic notion. Salvation is you and me living Jesus’ life in our lives. Heaven isn’t where we finally escape to, it’s where what God has begun in each of us is fulfilled. When the Common Prayer Book considers our eternal life, it prays that we may “continue to grow in Thy love and service.” We don’t “make it” into Heaven—we continue there. Christianity isn’t about guilt or sorrow or resigned sighing, but joy.

Passiontide is penitential, but it’s the penitence of subdued joy. The point of Passiontide and Holy Week isn’t to make us “feel” guilty. It takes as a given (our feelings aside) that we are guilty. That said, Passiontide and Holy Week isn’t about us at all. It’s about how God in Christ not only cleaned up the mess our ancestors made in the Garden (and we’ve been adding to ever since), but transfigured everything and everybody in the process. Passiontide isn’t meant to make us think about how guilty and bad we are. It takes us to Easter—where the Resurrection of Christ makes all things new—including those of us who’ve been ineptly slogging through Lent.

Passiontide turns our gaze to the Cross, not to make us feel guilty, but to make us sing. One of the oldest hymns of the season is the Vexilla Regis, “The Royal Banners,” written by Bishop Venantius Fortunatus about 1500 years ago. This is what Passiontide is about:

The royal banners forward go,
The Cross shines forth in mystic glow;
Where He in flesh, our flesh Who made,
Our sentence bore, our ransom paid.

Fulfilled is all that David told
In true prophetic song of old,
Amidst the nations, God, saith he,
Hath reigned and triumphed from the Tree.

Blest Tree, whose chosen branches bore
The Wealth that did the world restore,
The price of humankind to pay,
And spoil the spoiler of his prey.

O Cross, our one reliance, hail!
Still may thy power with us avail
To give new virtue to the saint,
And pardon to the penitent.

To Thee, eternal Three in One,
Let homage meet by all be done:
As by the Cross Thou dost restore,
So rule and guide us evermore.

The Cross, as you know, was a gruesome instrument of Roman torture. When Christ “ascended the Tree,” God transformed it to the sign of New Life and unending Joy. The Lord Christ took you and me, our failures and guilt, to the Cross with Him—and transformed us.

Neither Lent nor Passiontide are designed to manufacture guilt. If you’re guilty of sins, by all means, feel guilty—as long as it moves you to face up to your sins, confess them, get them forgiven and get on with your business—rejoicing in God’s creation, following Jesus as best you can, being His light in the darkness around you. If it doesn’t move you to confession, guilt is just an excuse, something to hide behind. St Paul insists: “We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into His death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” With its purple veils and subdued liturgies, we don't mourn our way through Passiontide: we celebrate it.