Archbishop of Sydney

lent

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
10/2/2008

Last Wednesday was the beginning of Lent, Ash Wednesday, the start of the period of preparation for the Christian feast of Easter.  Today I suppose that many would not be too sure what Lent is about and think that Ash Wednesday is the anniversary of a bad bushfire.

Once in a hundred years Ash Wednesday comes as early as this and once every two hundred years it occurs two days earlier.

Unfortunately even today, nearly 2000 years after Christ’s death and resurrection, Eastern and Western Christians do not agree on a common Easter date.

The Easter date is determined by the Paschal full moon, but the disputes about dating in the distant past were even more complicated than today.

Antioch and Alexandria were the most important theological centres for Christians until the Moslem invasions and they had different ways of determining the Paschal moon with the Antiochenes following the ancient Jewish method.

The first large meeting of bishops from around the Christian world after they obtained religious freedom was in Nicaea (north west Turkey) in 325 and they decided to follow the Alexandrian reckoning.

Later differences emerged between the Roman and Alexandrian Churches, because they used different paschal cycles, while today in the Western world we follow the Roman pattern with the Orthodox Churches having a different dating.

While a common Easter date would be a blessing, agreement soon is not very likely and much less important than identifying the true purposes of Lent.

Every adult knows that it makes sense every so often to have a health check, or to embark on a get-fit campaign or launch into an effort to lose weight.  In a religious sense Lent is a bit like this but only a bit!

Such efforts can be very self-centred for good or bad reasons.  Young men can go on body-building courses, even using steroids, to improve their sporting ability or even so that they look better and become more attractive.  This short-sighted selfishness often damages their health.

Christian Lent introduces a number of factors beyond self, such as God and other people.  Even more specifically Lent calls us to repent, to be sorry for our sins i.e. wilful mistakes which offend God and hurt other people.

Knowledge that God forgives those who repent, even when the human situation cannot be rectified, is one of Jesus Christ’s most beautiful and useful teachings.  Non-believers in God cannot turn to Him for this help.

Christians today do believe in forgiveness, but we sometimes make it too easy, as though forgiveness is automatic, requiring neither repentance nor reparation i.e. penance or good works to restore the balance, the predominance of good.

Lent reminds us of the reality of evil, that we are all sinners who need to repent to obtain forgiveness and that prayers, penances and good works are required to heal the wounds caused by selfishness.