The intention of the season of Lent is to provide for Christians a focus on personal growth in our discipleship. The New Testament places considerable weight upon perseverance in the faith.

Like a serious sportsman or trainer, those who truly desire growth in discipleship must be prepared to engage in the training, which consists of the various “races” or “exercises” that the Lord provides us with daily.

Small ceremonies such as the “Imposition of Ashes” are not at the heart of the training, but sometimes such ceremonies can be useful in giving us a certain perspective or outlook that nudges us to take the training seriously.

Dust and ashes remind us that as human beings we are not invincible: in the first place we are formed from the “dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7), and we are physically dying.

Without intervention that process of dying will one day take us over and cause us to revert to the dust or elements from which we were formed.

However, the training to which God calls us will help us become more aligned to the life that God’s intervention in Christ, culminating in resurrection, has called us to and caused us to be baptised into.

This is the life that as well as benefiting us (in spite of any cross that God calls us to bear), also benefits our neighbours.  This is because God has intervened out of His love for us, and in Christ has begun the work of placing His love at the centre of our lives.
If we with the love of God love our neighbours, whether within the fellowship of the Church or outside, our neighbours will benefit in various ways from that, just as we ourselves also have been touched and benefited by the love of God.

So in his list of apostolic travails in 2 Corinthians 6:4-8 St Paul speaks of the endurance and afflictions of God’s servants, as well as the spiritual fruit of God’s love within them such as purity, discernment, forbearance, kindness, a holy spirit and so on, as avoiding possible obstacles to their ministry being received.

God’s servants, he says, are considered themselves to be poor, and yet they make many others rich.  It is for us to hope that whatever Lenten exercises we engage in this year will bring forth more of the spiritual fruit of God’s love within us, so that our “neighbours” will receive the benefit of the increase of that love.

Isaiah chapter 58 speaks of a fast that God does not choose, and a fast that He does choose. A practice or ceremony that God “does not choose” is one in which the spirit is selfish, seeking its own pleasure, and oppresses those that serve it.

A practice or ceremony that God chooses is one in which there is a liberating spirit, a spirit of sympathy with the needful and action on his behalf.

If our Lenten practice serves to increase such a spirit within us, that is a divinely chosen Lenten practice. The traditional practices are prayer, self-denial and works of charity.

We should focus on these areas and select certain things to be done.  And at the same time we must remember the crucial importance of the spirit in which any such thing is undertaken.  That will, according to Isaiah, show whether God has chosen it or not, whether the origin of the chosen action is within the will of God.

John 8: 1 – 11 is about a woman taken in adultery and illustrates the contrasting spirit of Jesus and of those who were urging the woman should be stoned.

The Mosaic condemnation involved stoning, but Jesus’ first attack and condemnation of sin were by means of the self-examination of all who were there, which in its effect was a sword that impaled the woman’s accusers before any could condemn her.

The woman herself too was repentant of her own sin, and Jesus commanded her not to repeat it. His spirit was in full opposition to the sin both of the woman and her accusers, and acted to liberate them all from their condition.

Let us pray to the Lord that Lent will be for us a period of the growth of our spirits and attitudes into those that are liberating in their intention and effect, opposing and healing deterioration into pharisaic and oppressive selfishness (represented in the account by the woman’s accusers), or deterioration into godless libertinism and impurity (represented by the woman’s sin from which she turned), both of which are so strong in our society and in the world today.

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