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A Christian
Thought for the Month - March 2014
Thoughts for believers & seekers
Thought for the Month -
Thinking about Lent
1 Cor 1:23,24 “we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
Well it is March and March involves the beginning of Lent. Let’s do some quick Wikipedia searches to explain this time of the church calendar. Lent is “a solemn religious observance.... that covers a period of approximately six weeks before Easter Day. The season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday and ends on Maundy Thursday (Roman Catholic Church) or Easter Sunday (other western denominations.)”
Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of this .... period of prayer and fasting or abstinence. Ash Wednesday derives its name from the practice of placing ashes on the foreheads of adherents as a celebration and reminder of human mortality, and as a sign of mourning and repentance to God.
Shrove Tuesday (also known as Pancake Day) is the day preceding Ash Wednesday The expression "Shrove Tuesday" comes from the word shrive, meaning "confess". On this day many Christians, make a special point of self-examination, of considering what wrongs they need to repent, and what amendments of life or areas of spiritual growth they especially need to ask God's help in dealing with. Being the last day before the penitential season of Lent, in the past some cleared their larders of foods that might have been sacrificed for the upcoming Lent period and so had a celebratory meal at the end of the day. Pancakes are the traditional expression of this today.
This year Tuesday 4th March is Shrove Tuesday and Wednesday 5th March is Ash Wednesday. Of the 46 days until Easter, six are Sundays and Sundays are not included in the fasting period and are instead "feast" days during Lent. This brings us back to the forty days Jesus spent fasting in the desert at the beginning of his ministry, and Lent for some remembers that period as well as being used for a period of reflection before the awful and glorious days of Easter. Although we may consider this next month the key days of Easter are Good Friday, remembering the day on which Jesus Christ was crucified and Easter Sunday, remembering the day on which he rose from the dead.
I ran across an interesting quote about Ash Wednesday: “Today is Ash Wednesday, a day when we contemplate our mortality. I rubbed my cancer scar, said a prayer of thanks and moved on.” I don’t know who was supposed to have said that but I found it quite profound. Yes, as our definitions above indicated, Ash Wednesday is used by many to reflect on their mortality and someone who has had a cancer scare has probably got a better perspective on that than many of us. Coming through such a time and out the other side (well at least into a period of remission) must bring with it a profound sense of thankfulness for being alive and, no doubt, a desire to get on and use and enjoy life with a greater sense of purpose than we might have had before.
I have heard crusading atheists appearing scandalised at the thought of believers focusing on death, and especially the necessary death of Jesus Christ on a Cross. How miserable these miseries are, they chant. Now the wisest man in the world, King Solomon, who did quite a lot of writing on the meaning of life wrote, “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart.” (Eccles 7:2) His point, quite simply, was that people reflect better on the wonder of life when they have faced the horror of death, for death is something we all have to face one day. As the person quoted in the previous paragraph indicates, we perhaps only become thankful about our lives when they have been threatened with being removed.
Ash Wednesday, we said, was about reflecting on human mortality and about mourning and repentance. It tends to be only thoughtful people who mourn about their lives, whether they are religious or not. Thoughtful people acknowledge that we all have aspirations and yet never manage to live up to them. The person who is able to say, “I’m quite happy with the standards I have attained,” is short sighted and unable to see what they are really like – and what they could be. Even those who say, “Well we can’t all be Mother Teresa can we!” acknowledge indirectly that there is a better standard and they don’t live up to it. We excuse ourselves and hope we’ll get away with it. But then people start talking about God and we start feeling uncomfortable because if there is anyone likely to be concerned about justice and punishment in this world, we feel, it is likely to be Him – and that is worrying. That is why the word ‘repentance’ also appears in the definitions above. It just means a complete turn about, a turning back to God after having turned away from Him or having ignored Him.
If I have a problem with Lent it is simply that it tends to be self-centred. I am giving up things, I am feeling mournful and so on. The ‘I-factor’ worries me because the terrible truth is that I cannot make me a good person; only God can, and that is what Easter is really all about. It is about
1 Cor 1:23,24 “we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling-
Well it is March and March involves the beginning of Lent. Let’s do some quick Wikipedia searches to explain this time of the church calendar. Lent is “a solemn religious observance.... that covers a period of approximately six weeks before Easter Day. The season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday and ends on Maundy Thursday (Roman Catholic Church) or Easter Sunday (other western denominations.)”
Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of this .... period of prayer and fasting or abstinence. Ash Wednesday derives its name from the practice of placing ashes on the foreheads of adherents as a celebration and reminder of human mortality, and as a sign of mourning and repentance to God.
Shrove Tuesday (also known as Pancake Day) is the day preceding Ash Wednesday The expression "Shrove Tuesday" comes from the word shrive, meaning "confess". On this day many Christians, make a special point of self-
This year Tuesday 4th March is Shrove Tuesday and Wednesday 5th March is Ash Wednesday. Of the 46 days until Easter, six are Sundays and Sundays are not included in the fasting period and are instead "feast" days during Lent. This brings us back to the forty days Jesus spent fasting in the desert at the beginning of his ministry, and Lent for some remembers that period as well as being used for a period of reflection before the awful and glorious days of Easter. Although we may consider this next month the key days of Easter are Good Friday, remembering the day on which Jesus Christ was crucified and Easter Sunday, remembering the day on which he rose from the dead.
I ran across an interesting quote about Ash Wednesday: “Today is Ash Wednesday, a day when we contemplate our mortality. I rubbed my cancer scar, said a prayer of thanks and moved on.” I don’t know who was supposed to have said that but I found it quite profound. Yes, as our definitions above indicated, Ash Wednesday is used by many to reflect on their mortality and someone who has had a cancer scare has probably got a better perspective on that than many of us. Coming through such a time and out the other side (well at least into a period of remission) must bring with it a profound sense of thankfulness for being alive and, no doubt, a desire to get on and use and enjoy life with a greater sense of purpose than we might have had before.
I have heard crusading atheists appearing scandalised at the thought of believers focusing on death, and especially the necessary death of Jesus Christ on a Cross. How miserable these miseries are, they chant. Now the wisest man in the world, King Solomon, who did quite a lot of writing on the meaning of life wrote, “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart.” (Eccles 7:2) His point, quite simply, was that people reflect better on the wonder of life when they have faced the horror of death, for death is something we all have to face one day. As the person quoted in the previous paragraph indicates, we perhaps only become thankful about our lives when they have been threatened with being removed.
Ash Wednesday, we said, was about reflecting on human mortality and about mourning and repentance. It tends to be only thoughtful people who mourn about their lives, whether they are religious or not. Thoughtful people acknowledge that we all have aspirations and yet never manage to live up to them. The person who is able to say, “I’m quite happy with the standards I have attained,” is short sighted and unable to see what they are really like – and what they could be. Even those who say, “Well we can’t all be Mother Teresa can we!” acknowledge indirectly that there is a better standard and they don’t live up to it. We excuse ourselves and hope we’ll get away with it. But then people start talking about God and we start feeling uncomfortable because if there is anyone likely to be concerned about justice and punishment in this world, we feel, it is likely to be Him – and that is worrying. That is why the word ‘repentance’ also appears in the definitions above. It just means a complete turn about, a turning back to God after having turned away from Him or having ignored Him.
If I have a problem with Lent it is simply that it tends to be self-
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God’s Son taking our punishment on the Cross when he died so that
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we can enter into a relationship with God, free from fear of punishment or retribution,
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and go on to receive His power to live different lives.
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Justice can be a terrible thing. The whole thing about Jesus Christ, it that it is all about God coming to earth to provide a way for us to return to Him with justice being satisfied because our sins, our faults and failings, have all been dealt with on that Cross.
The apostle Paul in the New Testament of the Bible wrote, “we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Cor 1:23,24) Jews were the religious people of the world. The Greeks were the intellectuals of the world. Talk of Jesus dying on a Cross for our sins is foolishness to religious people who like to earn their brownie points by effort and ritual, and it is pure stupidity in the eyes of intellectuals who like to trust in their minds. To the person who is ‘drowning’ as they reflect on these things at Lent, it is a life-belt. It is God’s way of saying, “I love you, I have something better for you. There is a way through.”
The apostle Paul in the New Testament of the Bible wrote, “we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling-