Ash Wednesday, Lent
From the Primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion
"There is a truly wonderful passage in the Prophet Hosea (set for the Sunday before Lent in the current Lectionary). The Prophet dreams of a future age (as prophets always do) when Israel will recover the vigour of her youth. "On that day, says the Lord, you will call me 'My husband'."
Centuries later, the Evangelist Mark records that Jesus said to the Pharisees "The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they?"
These verses of Scripture are crucial for the modern church. Jesus did precisely what Hosea foresaw. He declared that He is the Bridegroom, and the Church is His Bride. Theologians call this "the nuptial imagery". It is impossible to understand the intimacy of our relationship to Jesus through our membership of the Church without this image - wonderfully described by Jesus in his parables of weddings and wedding feasts, and majestically trumpeted to the pagan world by Paul.
It is this imagery of the Jesus and his Bride that is mystically portrayed by the Christian Priest at the altar, proclaiming "This is my body, given for you". It is at this moment that the Bride and her Groom are most intimately united in Sacred Communion. Bells ring, incense and music swirl around the Altar, a profound silence falls At the hands of a "vessel of clay" - a man transformed by divine power and apostolic hands - to be a priest forever in the order of Melchisadech, a priest of Jesus Christ, the human and the Divine stand transfixed in a moment of Communion.
This Lent, remember that modern Anglicanism has twisted and distorted this image - an image that stands with the image of the Suffering Servant as the most basic and significant images the Scriptures offer us to understand Jesus. These most powerful images, conveyed by prophet and evangelist in witness to the very words of Jesus, are shattered when it is a woman who stands at the altar, just as they are shattered again when two men or two women stand before an altar seeking marriage. To sustain this new phenomena, a new gospel and new sayings of a Jesus unknown to history (and to prophets and evangelists) must be conjured from the imagination of contemporary politics and its theories. The nuptial imagery lays broken and trampled.
Lent for Traditional Anglicans therefore takes on powerful meanings these days. Lent is a time to take stock of love. Love is sustained by intimacy, and intimacy over time becomes abused and tired. Our sinfulness before the face of God blunts the ardour of our love of God.
Lent is a time to restore the intimacy of our love affair with our Bridegroom, Jesus. It is a time for His Bride, the whole Church, to renew love. When we go without some small thing, it is so that the Bride can present a surprise to her Beloved.
Lent is a time to rekindle in prayer the language of love. A time to simply spend time with Him, saying nothing, but enjoying the closeness to the One who means more than anything to us, and with whom we dream of spending an eternity of love.
Lent is the annual second honeymoon of our true lives - lives that are made for Jesus, and are weary until they live with Him. May you come to Good Friday better able to understand the enormity of His love for each of us. May you come to Easter thrilled that he lives, and ready to throw your arms around him, as Mary did, and cry with her: "Master!"
†John, Archbishop
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