Exhortation, First Sunday of Lent

This is the first Sunday in the traditional season of Lent, and as we enter this season we’ve made some changes in the liturgy. We will not be raising our hands, and we will say rather than sing some of the dialogue between the pastor and congregation. Several of the prayers are Lenten prayers, focusing on the suffering and death of Jesus.

Why do we do this? Isn’t every Sunday a celebration of the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus? Don’t we recall the sufferings of Jesus every Sunday?

Yes we do, and yet human life has a rhythm that goes beyond the short rhythms of days and night, workday and Lord’s day. The creation moves through an annual cycle of seasons, and we change our clothes, habits, pace with the seasons. Life has a beat, and the renewed life of the church also has a beat.

Modernity ignores this fact and regularizes time. Each second, minute, hour, day is the same as every other, marked by tedious, identical ticks of the clock. Even though the hours of daylight change throughout the year, we treat every “daytime” as equal. We still follow the legal fiction invented by ancient Romans of marking days from midnight to midnight.

Christianity has had a different concept and experience of time. For medieval monks, each day was a symbolic week marked by 7 hours of prayer, and the 7 liturgical hours also represented the seven ages of human history. Monks lived through all human history each day. Likewise, the church calendar annually passes through the whole of human history, moving from the beginning of the creation to its end. Between Christmas and Easter we compress Jesus’ lifetime of 33 years. Observing the church year means living rhythmically.

We don’t mark Advent and Christmas and Epiphany, Lent and Good Friday and Easter and Pentecost out of nostalgia. We mark these days in protest against the rationalisms and simplifications of modern time. We mark these seasons to declare the truth that time is “not a quantity, but a melody” (ERH).