Ash Wednesday and the Beginning of Lent

 

So I learned where Ash Wednesday comes from, or better to say why Lent is the only season that begins on a Wednesday.  When the decision to make Lent universally forty days through all the church was made a very, very long time ago, this did not include Sundays because Sundays were not fast days. There were six weeks, six times seven was forty two, forty subtract the six Sundays was thirty six and they could not add for days after Easter, so they added four before the First Sunday. Thus Ash Wednesday, the first of the fasting days.

Nowadays most of us in the West, and I would be surprised if most Orthodox people did it now either--do not truly fast for forty days. Some things are given up, meat is abstained from on all the Fridays of Lent and on Ash Wednesday. Nor do I have the desire or really the will to employ a forty day fast. For me Lent links me to an older time, and perhaps to a deeper practice. Thinking of all the various churches which called themselves the Catholic Church and all the various faces of Jesus represented in them, I am reminded there is no one way to walk this walk, to live in this tradition or to practice this season. Father John F Baldovin states in his series about Lent that Catholics do it better than any season and one of the reasons is because there is actually something to do. When I think of not fasting on a Friday or Wednesday, when I think of not abstaining from a thing or not getting up for prayers, not refraining from meat on Friday I think of all the ways I am missing out on feeling this season, and all for no particularly good reason. 

Those moments when we have forsaken, for a time, doing a thing one way, push us to doing it another way, which is to me what Lent is also about. In his book on Holy Week, Marcus J Borg notes that the word for believe used in the Gospel of Mark actually means to go beyond your own mind. The practices of ascetism, the practice of practicing the faith, are those of going beyond the limits of your own mind, entering into a place you had not been before. Coming into solitude you embrace and transform loneliness, coming into the space of prayer to silence the chattering nonsense in your head and give way to the silence of God. Coming into faith you learn to trust beyond the normal suspicions in which we live. The truth is we don't change, but we need to. And only when we change can the world change and only by this change can the God we so often call out for, enter.

Transfiguration Sunday

 

Yesterday was the last Sunday of Epiphany. Today is the last day. We had the same readings and tonight the gold star and the red banner, the last remnants of Epiphany will be taken down. Tomorrow we will have the seasonless space of Shrove Tuesday and then descend into Lent. The more popular modern celebration of the Transfiguration is August 6th, there, six days after Lammas, taen out of liturgical time and placed in the middle of Ordinary Time, it is hard to see it's meaning. Here it is the final Epiphany of Christ as Son of God and Son of Man before he turns south on the road for Jerusalem.

It is maturation of Christ. At the Epihany of the Magi he is, of course, a baby or a toddler. At the Baptsims, he coems ot start his journey. At the wedding in Cana he is the reluctant miracle worker. At Panem Vitam and Ergo Sundays he gives the Bread of Life and knows himself as the Bread of Heaven. Here he is acknowledged by the Old Testament and acclaimed by God the Father. The Discplies look on amazed and uncomprehehdning, and we are uncomprehending with them. The gospel is a riddle. How silly of us to think we've solved it. 

I have to stop a moment and read up on the Transfiguration. I am surprised to read that no one knows the mountain. I had always assumed it was Mount Carmel, but this is a case of putting something into the reading that is not there, something Christians have been wont to do for centuries. Tradition has it as Mount Tabor. I think, what is transfiguration. Jesus is transfigured, but no, revealed, to be what he is. He is seen as he truly is, for one moment, not simply illuminated, but revealed, He is not transformed, or if he s, he is transformed into what he was all along. as the waters in the Jordan are transformed at his baptism, as the water to wine and the bread and fish to much bread, as we are, transfigured into all that we are.

It is only trasnfigured, only experiencing himself as the Son of God and Son of Man that he turns toward Jerusalem. When eh goes he does not go blindly. When he walks into his destiny and into his trial he does it fully, and so shall we

Fifth Sunday of Epiphany: Panen Vitam

The bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

“Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.”

Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never  hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst."

Jn 6. 33-36

The last five weeks have taken us on several different Epiphanies of the One Great Epiphany. Christ is the Epiphany of God in this world and in our human lives. Epiphany if the Meeting of God in his flesh and in our flesh, one reason why the week focusing on the Temptation in the Desert is a week in Epiphnany, but not an Epiphany. We see have seen Christ as Infant, Christ as Initiate in Baptism, Christ as Wedding Guest and now Christ as Teacher and Provider. Christ as Bread and Sustenance.

The Jesus of a few weeks ago was reluctant to work a miracle. He was reluctant to go into his work almost. This Jesus feeds the five thousand and then declares that a miracle is not simply sometign amazing, but something to be seen into. It is a lesson. A parable worked in wonder. This is the Jesus who not onyl makes wine but declares that if we eat his flesh and drink his blood we will be united to him and he wil lbe in us. This is something more than a teacher. This is promising more than a kingdom. This is more than service before God. Jesus is speaking of union, and in the most mindbending of ways.

Jesus is in fact speaking more like Dionysus than like Jeremiah. He is, in this speech , doing a new and intentionally different thing. John says the Jews grappled to conmprehend it and rejected it and well they might, but he leaves out the fact that Christians react the same. Jesus, here, loses many disciples, not only he loses many causal followers, uth e loses dsicipels. Pehrpahs he gained some as well. There is already a nascent church within these Gospels.

This is a birth of the Church. The Church isn't born just once or in the same way in every Gospel. Here arather than before hte Transfiguration, Peter declares Jesus the Christ and says for them all, to whom would we go. You have the words of eternal life. These are the people bound to Jesus as more than teachers, as very God and very bread and meat and drink.

I am finishing up the Gospel of Mark and as I read it I see that Jesus is always with disciples They are always traveling in tow. The number is not told. It is not simply the twelve. Children are with them. Families are with them. And I think part of this is because the the Gospel does not tell a past story, but a present story, a story that leaves time, and so when we ready about Jesus and the unnumbered follwoers traveling with him to Jerusalem we can number ourselves in that crowd. As he sets out we are told that the dsciples followed in fear and those most afraid were furthest behind. Still, they followed. Pane Vitam Sunday invites us into this family of Jesus that follows, sometimes close, sometiems far, sometimes hanging back a few days, far more than an insstitution or an organization, beyond small congregations or denominations or even orthodoxy or heterodoxy. Jesus says, those who are not against me are for me. The only test is that we be for him, and that we be for each other, that we be living in love. He does not ask that we not be afraid, only that fear not define us.