Easter Day is the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after 21 March (the Spring Equinox). This year it is on 23rd March, almost as early as it can be and a ‘once-in-a-century’ occurrence (the next time Easter will be on 23rd March is 2160). Such an early Easter means that having celebrated the feast of Candlemas (the presentation of Christ in the Temple) on 2nd February we go straight to the beginning of Lent with Ash Wednesday on 6th February.
But, rather than be downhearted, Revd David Matthews encourages us to:
Have a Heart for Lent
'If you have a heart, you can be saved'* It is tempting to spend Lent in avoidance—the 'no-chocolate-but-lots-of malice' approach—which makes us feel pious but insulates us from any thing which might challenge or touch us, deep in our hearts.
'If I have no love I am nothing' [1 Cor 13:3] reminds us that Lent begins and ends with compassion, as our disciplines train our heart's response to the Christ whose Cross and Empty Tomb show us the 'full extent of His love' [St John 13:1]. 'We love Him because He first loved us' [1 John 4:19]—any compassionate response of ours is caught up in God's eternal and invincible love which encompasses all things.
‘Take heart, it is I.
Do not be afraid’
Nicholas Mynheer’s sculpture of Christ and
St Peter hangs in
St Peter’s church, Goetre
'Take heart'—the words of Jesus to Peter in the midst of his perilous attempts to walk on water [St Matt 14:27] can lift us up as we face what can be the daunting prospect of an early Lent this year. Having just put away the Crib, out comes the sackcloth! To cope, we need to set ourselves worthwhile and realisable goals so that we neither lose heart nor fritter it all away for want of trying.
'Have a heart'—in the sense of not expecting too much either of yourself, of others, or of God. Choose something that will draw you closer to the Lord while stretching your 'compassion muscles' so that, reaching out beyond yourself, you will thereby be led some way along the path of greater spiritual, self and other awareness. Be kind but resist self-indulgence. Let compassion be your guide.
'If you have a heart, you can be saved' both reassures and warns us, for its corollary suggests that 'if you do not have a heart, you cannot be saved'. However tempting, a self-centred Lent is no Lent at all. So, put 'heart' back into these forty days and forty nights - and don't lose it (in any sense!).
The God whose love is calling you and me throughout Lent to 'wrestle and fight and pray' [From the hymn Soldiers of Christ, arise by Charles Wesley] in ‘Christian spiritual warfare' is the same Lord who 'by His Cross and Passion' will 'bring us to the glory of His Resurrection'. Remember, too, that it's not our temptations that matter, it's what we do or do not in response to them that counts.
Have a heart this Lent—and enjoy an early Easter!
*attributed to Abba Pambo in Les sentences des peres du Desert (3eme recueil, Solesmes 1976)