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I was always taught, of course,
that you should never under any
circumstances say 'Alleluia' during Lent. It was like giving up
chocolate or alcohol. Save it till Easter, and then you'll really enjoy
it as it was meant to be enjoyed.
There's plenty of good sense about this, if we understand what Lent is
properly about - a preparation for Easter, a reminder that we still live
in a world in which Easter hasn't yet quite sunk in and changed as it
should.
Just as in Advent we have to remember that we all still in some ways
live in a pre-Christian world, waiting for Christ to arrive not only in
Bethlehem but in our hearts and minds, so in Lent: the cross and the
resurrection are never over and done with, never things we have been
through and understood once and for all. Ahead of us lies the immense
bulk of failure and suffering, to be faced again and again with whatever
degree of honesty we can manage. So every year, we need to live for a
little while in such a way that Easter comes as a massive surprise and
novelty.
Well, this year I started Lent in Sudan. Ash Wednesday found me in
temperatures of 40-odd sharing in food distribution in a school and a
refugee camp in Malakal and celebrating Holy Communion in a large and
ultra-humid tent. Pretty well everything, every aspect of that
environment, seemed set to remind us that we still lived in a world
where the cross was the immediate reality and resurrection hope was
definitely a thing of the future. Hunger, desperate poverty, the traces
of unspeakable trauma and violence, and the present reality of the same
unspeakable brutality not too far away in Darfur - this, surely, was a
world untouched by Easter.
But one thing you quickly
discover at worship in the Sudan is that there
is no occasion free from alleluias. That Ash Wednesday service echoed
with the joyful shouting of 'Alleluia' - from the children and the women
especially as we came in, from every speaker who got near the microphone
during the service, in hymns and songs throughout. My liturgical
conscience had to resign and slink away. Lent it might be, but this was
not an Easter-free zone.
Which is quite a good counterbalance to where I started. Yes, we need to
be reminded by abstinence and restraint that the world is still a Good
Friday sort of place, shadowed by abandonment, terror, pain. But what if
you don't really need reminding? What if, like the Sudanese believers,
you have lived so long with abandonment and terror and pain that you can
never forget or ignore it? These were people whose whole life was a
particularly awful and crushing 'Lent'.
Yet they could not stop saying, singing, shouting, 'Alleluia'. If they
lived in a long-term Lent, they also lived in an unceasing awareness of
Easter. They had come through the horrors of war and oppression with the
confidence intact that God was always there on the far side or in the
depths of what they were enduring. If everyone else forgot them,
God
would not and could not. Because he was alive, they could live too - to
echo the words of Jesus in John's gospel.
The mystery of Christian faith is really something we can't ever put
into words because it is about so many things that are all true all at
once, but we can only talk about them one at a time. Advent and
Christmas and Good Friday and Easter and Pentecost, Baptism and
Communion and birth and death are all packed up together, inseparably.
But whether in our words or in the course of the Christian year, we
usually have to pull them apart and take them in some kind of series.
And it's good that we do, since we have to give ourselves a chance to
think things through carefully and to experience the time it takes to
get from old to new, from death to life.
But once in a while something happens that pushes it all together again,
confusingly and wonderfully, telling us that Advent is already,
eternally, overtaken by Christmas, Lent by Easter, death by life. God is
always there ahead of us, his future already part of the present. I
think that was the gift - or one of the many gifts - I received from our
brothers and sisters in Sudan. Yes, we ought as a rule to take things at
their proper pace, one thing at a time. But let's not forget that God is
already ahead of us; that there really is an 'alleluia dimension' in the
very heart of Lent and Passiontide. And the people who can tell us that
are people like the Sudanese, who have, quite simply, met the Risen Lord
in the darkest times.
With my love and prayers for a very blessed Easter season.
+Rowan