Day: March 14, 2021

“And this he said to prove him; for he himself knew what he would do.”

The traditional readings for The Fourth Sunday in Lent have given rise to a number of titles or terms for this Sunday in such things as ‘Mothering Sunday,’ ‘Refreshment Sunday,’ and ‘Laetare Sunday’. The first and third derive from the significance of Jerusalem in both the Jewish and Christian understanding; Paul in Galatians speaks of “Jerusalem which is above which is free; which is the mother of us all,” our spiritual homeland, while the Latin Introit for this day is from Isaiah 66. 10, “Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad for her, all you who love her.” The second term, ‘Refreshment Sunday,’ derives from the Gospel story of the feeding of the five thousand in the wilderness in John’s account. These folk titles and terms have a hold on the imagination yet are meaningless without these Scriptural references. Other folk customs and practices have grown up around them such as the tradition of Simnel cake eaten on this day, or Mi-Carême in the French Canadian tradition in which people put on disguises and go from house to house singing and dancing and looking for treats, a Lenten version of the Christmas traditions of mummering in Newfoundland and elsewhere.

These things all help to mark the midpoint of the Lenten journey. At best they serve to remind us that the pilgrimage of Lent is not just to God but with God in the wilderness conditions of human experience. They remind us of an essential feature of the pilgrim ways, namely that it is a blessing and a cause for joy and not some kind of grim and tiresome restriction. We might do well to remember that in the face of COVID-19 and the ups and downs of its restrictions. “Blessed are they whose strength in in thee,/ in whose heart are the pilgrim ways; /Who going through the Vale of Misery use it for a well;/yea, the early rain covereth it with blessings,” as Psalm 84 (vs. 5,6) teaches. This is the counter to what N.T. Wright calls our “late-flowering Epicureanism,” which may or may not be the same as the rather restrictive nature of Epicurus’s teachings which are at some remove from contemporary hedonism.

Yet such things can also distract us from the way in which these readings connect us to the deeper meaning of Lent as the way of the Cross and to our participation in the Passion of Christ. The blessing of the pilgrim ways is in Christ and in his Exodus, or going forth into the wilderness of our sin and darkness. This Sunday is not a reprieve or a rest-stop on the way to a happy-clappy Easter. It looks back and it looks ahead, not only back to Exodus and to Numbers in terms of the wilderness journey of Israel which is reworked in Christ, but also back to the lessons of the last three Sundays. It also anticipates and so looks ahead to Maundy Thursday and to the Passion itself at the same time as it highlights for us the sacramental means of our participation in Christ’s sacrifice throughout the whole of the pilgrim ways of our life.

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