Sermon for Quinquagesima
“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”
Quinquagesima Sunday signals the near approach of Lent. It is the Sunday before Ash Wednesday and in so many ways, it teaches us about the very meaning of Lent. It is a journey, a going up to Jerusalem, as Jesus puts it in Luke’s Gospel. It is a journey in love and by love as Paul’s wonderful and profound hymn of love in 1st Corinthians puts it.
Jerusalem. Love. These are two of the key ingredients to the understanding of Lent. For what is it all about? Simply this. Lent captures in the span of forty days the entire meaning of Christian faith and love. What!? Surely that seems a bit much to claim. But no. Lent, a word derived from Old English that refers to the lengthening of the days that bring us to the joys of nature’s spring, recalls us to the journey of our souls into that greater light and life that is the Resurrection. But only through the disciplines of penitential adoration.
That is the key theme that recognizes the human problem of sin which separates us, individually and collectively, from all that belongs to the true good and happiness of our humanity. In the Christian understanding, that can only be found by our being in Christ and Christ being in us. Jerusalem is the ultimate symbol of the communion of saints and the community of blessedness which is the deep truth of all our desiring.
What do we want? In all of the confusions of our world and day, in all of the confusions of our churches and communities, in all of the confusions of our hearts and minds, we desire happiness and goodness, light and life, and, if truth be known, we desire to attain to such things everlastingly. Mistaken though we may be (and are) about the desires of our hearts and minds, the truth of what we desire is captured in the image of Jerusalem and in the deep meaning of charity or love. We seek nothing less than the love of God which is the truth of all that exists as its originating principle and as its end.
