Just as Advent prepares us to celebrate the birth of Christ, so Lent prepares us to celebrate His passion and resurrection.  But then why do we need these seasons of preparation before the two major feasts of the Church, Christmas and Easter?  Well, society around us would say that we don’t.  Instead of a time of Advent preparing us for Christmas we have 2 months of Christmas celebration before Christmas even comes, and the same is true in a similar way with Easter.  Easter candy and costumes start showing up in stores 2 months beforehand.  But isn’t this celebration without preparation like giving an answer without knowing what the question is?  Why do we celebrate Christmas, even when the celebration is centered on the birth of Christ?  What problem is His birth the solution to?  What crisis is it the remedy for?  What are we really celebrating and why?  The same could be asked regarding the Passion of Christ and His resurrection.  What is it that we are celebrating?  Christ’s suffering, death, burial and resurrection, of course; but why are we celebrating that?  What about those events is worth celebrating, and what condition on our part made those events good news worth rejoicing in?

 

Well, we’ll leave the Advent/Christmas conversation for another time.  The focus of these comments will be on Lent and Easter.  The Passion and Resurrection of Christ are absolutely worth celebrating.  They are at the center of our redemption and new life.  But sometimes the good news of those events grows stale, and we forget the bad news that it replaces.  We forget how far we had fallen from the blissful life of communion with God and each other in which we were created.  We forget our exile from the Paradise that God intended for us.  We forget how enslaved to sin, death, and satan we had become, and we forget what true life looks like, the life Christ gained for us by His passion and resurrection.  Sin and death, through the deceptions of the devil, took us into bondage and robbed us of our share in God’s divine life.  We were intended to become by grace what God is by nature, to become partakers of the grace of His divinity.  Our appetites and passions were to be our servants to lead us to fulfillment in him, and instead they became our masters, and through sin they directed us to satisfaction in all the wrong things.  Christ came to liberated us from all of that and restore us to normal human-divine life, and He gave us tools or disciplines of grace to help us cooperate with Him by embracing and assimilating the life that He gained for us.  Prayer and fasting and almsgiving – while these are discipleship practices that are appropriate all year – they are especially commended to us during the preparatory period of Lent.  Prayer helps free us from pride, fasting from gluttony, and almsgiving from greed, and all the other deadly sins of lust, sloth, envy, and anger flow from these.  So, Lent is a period in which we embrace these disciplines more intentionally in order to draw more near to God and participate in the liberation that Christ gained for us through His saving actions.  Then we will be able to more fully appreciate and celebrate what Christ did for us.  The disciplines aren’t the goal; God and His Life is the goal.

 

It has become popular during Lent for people to ask each other, “What are you going to give up for Lent?”  But that is putting the focus in the wrong place.  A better question is, “What do you want to gain during Lent?”  If that is the focus, and the desired gain is to be more fully united to Christ, then the disciplines or the things that we give up are merely a means to that end.

 

During Advent and Christmas, we focus on God coming to us, which makes it possible for us to come to Him, and in Lent we labor to more fully do just that.  In Lent we are liberated from the tyranny of the flesh and become more fully clothed in Christ.  That makes us more able, then, to appreciate and celebrate all that He did for us on Holy Friday and Easter Sunday.