thought for the week

THE Christian season of Lent begins on February 26. Lent is an old English word for the season of Spring and it represents the 40 days Jesus spent being tempted in the wilderness.

This year I’m going to be following a campaign called ‘Lament for Lent’. The campaign urges people to take the time to lament so that they can learn to lean more deeply on God. There are so many things in our world worth lamenting right now: climate crisis and the recent floods, the threat of the Corona virus, the fate of the Syrians in Idlib.

We know that at times Jesus wept and expressed the deepest sorrow for things happening in his life, and as we focus on his time in the wilderness lament seems appropriate. But lament is not wallowing in our sorrow and getting bogged down. Lament can be a useful way of finding a path through darkness to the light.

You might remember the Boney M hit from the seventies, Rivers of Babylon, which was actually a setting of one of the oldest poems in the Bible. ‘By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down, there we wept when we remembered Zion...how shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’

And yet that particular lament ends with a note of hope and optimism that God will still be with us and that we need have nothing to fear, even when things seem at their worst because with God is grace and power to free us and save us. That’s the challenge of Lent: to emerge from the wilderness restored, rejuvenated, feeling it’s good to be alive with not only a glass that is half full, but overflowing.