Ash Wednesday 2013

What a difference three days makes. On Sunday we were with Peter, James and John on the mountain-top, bathed in heaven's light. Celestial glory  poured forth from the face of Jesus and we knew that God stood in our midst. Tonight things have changed. The glory has departed and the shadows gather. Instead of luminous radiance our liturgical language speaks of sorrow and penitence, of repentance and shame.

And inexorably the question arises - why? Peter, James and John have seen the face of God. Why do they need to return to the plain, to the ordinary life and ministry of Galilee and to the agony of the cross and Passion? And we, we who live on the far side of the resurrection, we upon whom the Spirit has been poured, why do we need to venture into the wilderness? Why can we not remain on the mountain-top, assured of the presence of our God? Why does he insist upon this austerity first? Why does he need our tears and our fasting - why does he need our misery?

We are asking the wrong question, of course. To understand the passion of Christ as something insisted on by God, as something required by him as a necessary preliminary of our salvation, is to misunderstand it. To understand Lent in similar terms, as an obstacle course created by God, containing many hurdles which we must climb, and many streams which we must ford, is likewise to misunderstand it. God does not rejoice in the suffering of Christ and God does not rejoice in the disciplines of Lent. But God knows the violence, anger, rage, and grief of which humankind is capable and in which humankind is immersed. And God knows also that bathing a mountain-top in celestial light will not address the destructive powers and passions which disfigure and enslave his creation. Christ must descend to the plain to take upon himself the full force of the world's rage and fear, and to defuse and defeat it once and for ever. And God also knows that were we simply to leap from Epiphany to Easter we would do so with all our own rage and pain intact and ready to be unleashed at any moment. Lent is given us as a space in which, if we use it seriously, we may get to know ourselves better. It  is a window in our crowded diaries, if you will, a window in which we can get better acquainted with our interior selves and make ourselves more ready for the coming of the glory of God.

Churches of our tradition tell their members repeatedly that they are loved by God and that they could not be more loved by him. That is true and nothing I am about to say is to resile from it. But if our rage and our pain, if our anger, our violence, our dishonesty, our addiction is not recognized for what it is then how much harder will it be for us to discern and to accept the love that we are offered in the risen Christ. Rowan Williams observes that CS Lewis, not often accused of being a liberal, envisages all created beings ultimately standing before the face of Aslan and deciding for him or against him on the basis of what they most deeply desire and who they have made themselves. Lent allows us to consider afresh what we most deeply desire and who we are in the process of becoming.

And if we use Lent seriously then I think that what we may discover is that behind the anger, behind the shame, behind the compulsive patterns we are critically, crucially afflicted by an all-consuming fear, which is the defining syndrome of our age, our city, and our community. It manifests itself in many different guises. We are fearful of the meat content of some of the products we are sold. We are fearful of the eruption of gang culture onto streets not far from here. We are fearful for our financial and domestic futures. None of these fears is unreasonable. Each has a basis in fact: the discovery of horseflesh in frozen lasagne; a young man slaughtered on Lupus Street; the ongoing economic malaise and the emergence of new and untested societal phenomena.  Yet even reasonable fear can be harmful. It can prompt us into rash reaction; it can confine our vision; it can ensnare us and it can make us small. It can make us less than the people God wants us to be. It can corrupt all our thinking, all our dreaming and all our speaking, so that all we do, all we plan, and all we imagine is merely a commentary upon our fear rather than anything free, independent, or Spirit-inspired. Fear means that when we look at Aslan we worry about the health and safety implications of our proximity to a large wild beast. Fear breaks in where trust and faith fail. If St Peter's wants to adopt a common objective this Lent then it could be that it would like to become slightly less fearful.

The only way of doing that is not assertiveness training, anger management, or any other contemporary panacea. It's entering the wilderness. It's stopping and listening. It's consciously doing without the props and crutches that sustain us from day to day. It's patiently attending to our fear and understanding, discovering that despite it we are held, through it we are accompanied, behind it we are gazed upon in love by the One who alone casts out fear. 'Do not be afraid' he will tell us on Easter morning. 'Do not be afraid'. Amen.