THE SACRAMENT OF LENT

Thursday after Second Sunday of Lent

Many Jews in Jesus’ day didn’t believe in an afterlife (many today don’t either). It’s not an essential tenet of Judaism. Even Jews who did believe in life-after-death, however, believed that God rewarded “righteousness” (which they understood as “upright behavior”) with spiritual and material blessings here on earth. Piety and prosperity went hand in hand. We see this repeatedly in both Testaments of the Bible. When Job is sorely afflicted, his friends surround him and urge him to confess what he’d done wrong. If he’d been truly righteous, they chide him, none of his many misfortunes would have happened. Centuries later, Jesus' disciples echo the same thought: “Who sinned,” they asked the Lord, “this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” God rewarded piety and punished sin, the Jews believed, and you could see who He loved and who He didn’t by looking at the circumstances of their lives.

This kindergarten approach to holiness and sin dominated Jewish thought and practice. Jesus, Isaiah foretold, would come and make the blind to see. He didn’t just mean those with useless eyes in the sockets of their heads. The prophet meant that the One Who was to come would open the eyes of the spiritually blind, too. That’s the blindness that cripples.

In St Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells the parable of Dives and Lazarus—the rich man who lives in luxury and the beggar, who lives a pauper at his gate. In the parable, both men die. Dives, the rich man, ends up in Hades, “tormented in flames,” while Lazarus finds joyful consolation in Heaven with Abraham. Seeing Lazarus with Abraham, Dives calls out. “Send Lazarus with water to cool my tongue.” Abraham refuses. “Son, remember that in your lifetime you received good things, and Lazarus evil things: now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.” The parable continues on, but these few verses are worth some pondering by themselves.

Every observant Jew who heard this parable would have been irritated by it. If Dives deserved the rewards God gave him on earth, why does he end up in hell? If Lazarus deserved to rest in the bosom of Abraham in death, he shouldn’t have suffered on earth. Jesus’ hearers would have been upset because the parable is unfair. The rewards of the pious man and the sinner have been mixed up and wrongly distributed.

And yet, nobody challenges Jesus at the end of the parable. No one gripes about his twisting of the traditional understanding of rewards and punishments. There’s a reason his indignant hearers kept their silence: they knew there was truth in what He said. Sometimes, “bad things happen to good people,” and they knew it. Jesus’ hearers understood, their dogmatic insistence aside, that things don’t always work out as they should. The world is not just, and their religion couldn’t tell them why.

People listened to Jesus because He spoke honestly to them. He said things they often didn’t want to hear (the Scribes and Pharisees did not “hear Him gladly”), but they knew He was telling them the truth. He challenged their simplistic ideas about God and injustice and holiness and sin, daring them to see how radical His Kingdom is: “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other…if anyone sues you for your coat, give him your cloak, too…Judge not, lest you be judged…” This is a new standard of righteousness, a new degree of holiness, which the world had never seen up till then (and has seen only rarely since). We hear the words of Jesus from His Sermon on the Mount and the first response of our souls is wonder. “If only it could be, if only I could live like that. But, of course, I can’t. I have responsibilities and bills, I’m trying to improve my credit rating and lose ten pounds before Easter. That guy I work for is a jerk, nobody could forgive him for how he treats me. And that idiot who lives upstairs…” And so on, world without end. We have watered down the Kingdom of God with 2,000 years of excuses.

How would the world—your world—be different if you were to take ONE of Jesus’ New Laws from that sermon (St Matthew 5.1-7.27) and live it for Lent? Forgive an enemy—not ceremonially and loudly, but quietly, from the true recesses of your heart? How about giving alms so that nobody could ever know? Can you pray for those who hate you—a hatred you may reciprocate—without being sanctimonious—by simply saying their names, without comment or instructions to God, from now till Easter?

Jesus attacked the Pharisees with such ferocity because their piety was unsacramental. It was an outward and visible sign—of nothing. They fasted and prayed and gave alms and knew that God loved them more than anybody else because of what they did. Like them, we fast and pray and give alms—obviously, things by themselves not satisfying to Jesus. What does He demand of His disciples? That our Lenten observances be sacramental—outward and visible signs of turning from sin, of opening the closed areas of our hearts to God and our fellows and, as giving meaning to all, of love—charity—caritas. “By this will all men know that you are My disciples, that you love one another.”

When the Forty Days are over and we’re singing the Resurrection Alleluias, they will have been days well spent, not if we’ve kept them unblemished, with all the outward proprieties observed, but if our fasting, praying and almsgiving have brought us closer—even if just a little—to Him Who loves us, and gives Himself for us.