In today’s
production oriented society, it is not uncommon to hear our fellow laborers
exclaim at the end of a long and exhausting work day, “Where did the day
go?” At the end of the calendar year, it
has become commonplace to hear our fellow citizens say, “Where did the year
go?” And when Christmas and Easter
arrive each year, it is unfortunately all too common to hear our brethren in
Christ say, “Where did Advent and Lent go?”
Will it happen that at the end of our lives, we will echo these sad
sentiments to our children, and say with tears in our eyes, “Where did my life
go?” Let it not be so with us! With only a few days remaining before Lent,
let us begin our reflection upon this most solemn season, in order that this
Lent may be for us the journey of our lives.
Why does the Church impose this season of repentance? Why do the followers of Jesus make acts of
reparation for forty days? To answer
these questions properly, we must again return to the story of salvation
history, and consider our own lives in light of God’s grand plan for mankind.
Recall that
in the beginning, God placed man in a paradise of delight and offered him
participation in his own divine life. However, Adam and Eve listened not to the
life-giving words of the Creator, but accepted the words of death from the
mouth of the Serpent, who flattered them with the thought of achieving eternal
life apart from God. To their bitter
sorrow, the pair discovered the lie of the devil, and rather than eternal life,
they found only death. It is from this
act of disobedience that all of mankind became inheritors of a nature divorced
from divinity, receiving a nature joined not to God, as was the plan in the
beginning, but rather disfigured by sin and yoked to death.
It is for
this reason that the Son of God was born of the Virgin and died upon the
cross. The Word of God, Creator of the
World, could not stand to see his creation bound to death, and thus he took to
himself human nature, reuniting God and man in the person of Jesus. With that human nature, God entered into
death, being crucified upon the cross, and buried in the tomb. With that human nature, God burst asunder the
bars of Hades, and gave life back to mankind, for just as when light enters
into darkness and darkness is no more, so when Life enters death, death is
destroyed. At the death of Christ, as
Saint John Chrysostom explained in his famous Easter sermon, Hell “took a body,
and met God face to face. It took earth,
and encountered Heaven. It took that
which was seen, and fell upon the unseen.”
In other words, the Devil grasped what he thought was mortal, and
discovered immortality, and in that act, the grip of death upon mankind was destroyed.
Each one of us, inheritors of a nature joined to death, now
has hope, for our Savior has walked our nature forth from the tomb. But that is not the end of the story. If we are to escape eternal death and be
freed from the curse of Adam, we must become partakers of Christ; we must
somehow enter into the mystery of Christ’s resurrection. This is where Lent fits into the
picture. Lent is our journey to the day
of the resurrection. Lent is, for us, a
time to be united completely to Christ, in order that when He walks forth from
the tomb on the glorious day of Easter Sunday, we might walk with him. However, one event must of necessity stand in
the way of that day, for no one comes forth from the tomb who has not first entered
into it. It is now our challenge to
become so united to Christ during the forty days of Lent, that when the day of
the crucifixion is before us, we, like the good thief, may willingly die with
God, in order that we may also live with Him.
No one will rise on Easter morning who has not first been nailed to the
cross with Jesus.
With only forty days to make our journey, let us begin now
to prepare, so that at the end of Lent we may not say, “Where did all the time
go?” but rather, “Christ is risen, and I
have risen with him!” Let us make it our
goal that through fasting, confession, penance, and almsgiving, we may accept
willingly the death that our first parents dealt to all of mankind, in order
that we may be counted among those who, on the glorious day of the resurrection,
will rise with Christ and live with him forever.
-Deacon Sabatino
-Deacon Sabatino
