I was reading the account of the martyrdom of St Agatha last week by St Methodius of Sicily (sorry if that sounds grandiose, but actually it’s in the Divine Office for the feast), and I was struck by something Methodius says of the virgin martyr: “For her, Christ’s death was recent, his blood was still moist.”
Finding Lent arriving so soon this year, this saying took on a particular relevance as I contemplated the beginning of the penitential season. Only if I feel similarly, that Christ’s Passion and death, his saving sacrifice, are something fresh, will I enter into the season of penance with the appropriate disposition. There is always a slight resistance in me to Lent, I must confess: a niggling resentment which when I analyse it is very much like the one I used to get if the whole class was kept behind for the misdemeanours of a few.
I realise that my reaction to Lent is pride, and that the good Christian doesn’t equate penance with punishment. Still less does he imagine that he is not in need of it because he isn’t “like other men”. Each year my view needs to be refined and corrected.
The disposition of St Agatha is a pointer to understanding Lent not as an encounter with my weak and flabby self, which needs to get into spiritual trim in time for Easter, but as an encounter with the Christ whose death is recent, whose blood is still moist, calling me with urgency to suffer with and for him; to take up my cross so as to live in solidarity with Jesus, who leads and perfects me in my faith. The Christian does not fast or pray or give alms to prove to himself that he can, or for a kind of enlightened self-interest that these things “will make me feel better about myself”. He does it so as to enter into the obedience of Jesus, the same obedience which took him to his Cross. This obedience is neither the unreasoned following of custom or order nor a fawning in the face of another whose punishment I fear, nor the fragile perfectionism which seeks to earn love.
A Lenten discipline is in hearing and responding to a call which comes from the Cross. It is the disciple model of discipline, not the punishment sort. Lent, then, is an encounter with the crucified Jesus. For this I must be empty, I must enter into his powerlessness. This powerlessness does not derive from weakness, but from dependence on the Father moment by moment, from a desire to be emptied of everything that does not directly affirm the Father’s will, a loving docility which surrenders to the Other. This is what turns slavery into sonship. In his 40 days in the wilderness Jesus relives the experience of slaves who wander in search of freedom and rest. The Devil would have him assert his own version of freedom, a freedom which manifests itself in refusing to serve, the solipsistic freedom of that which you seek within yourself. Jesus chose to depend, to trust, showing us why and how we must become as little children.
In St Luke’s version of the temptations there is an ominous ending to the account: “And the Devil left him, to return at the appointed hour.” The appointed hour is the Passion. There the same dynamic will be played out: the refusal to trust to anything except the Father’s sovereign will to save, in the face of every human certainty which says that self-interest and sheer common sense would do better to look to saving oneself by any means.
It may sound odd, but I need to fast so that I can hear Jesus – hear his call echo in the spaces normally so full of the things I can consume and control that the sound is deadened. I need to experience a hunger that is at a deeper level even than my body’s satiety, which my body can put me in touch with when I experience not its submission or subjection, but rather something of its frailty.
The “no” to the body which is fasting is like the pruner’s or vinedresser’s art, which ensures that the growing organism is shaped to search for nourishment for growth in the place it most needs it. This paradoxically comes by sacrificing a shape, a direction of growth, that in itself is not necessarily malign. The results will not be immediately apparent, nor is the action the end, only the means. It is by the fruit that is yielded that the purpose becomes apparent, and the paradoxical fruit of Lenten discipline is the freedom to give myself away.
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