Giving up chocolate as a life and death drama
On Wednesday, it being Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, like many people I had ash put on my forehead, in the form of a cross. I could hardly wait to wash it off, since my colleagues already think me a little odd and I didn’t want to seem a complete nutter.
You might think this rather feeble. Even so, the ashes were imposed with the words: “Repent and believe the Gospel,” and this seems enough of a programme for Lent. Why, then, do we traditionally practise fasting and self-denial in Lent?
An argument is that fasting trains one to resist temptation and acquire the fortitude to carry out good works. That is true. Serious Christians ought to be able to muster the same kind of commitment that athletes embrace in order to improve their performance. But asceticism is no specifically Christian way of behaving; Buddhists can be tough, too.
Christian penitential practices, though, are surely connected to the life and death of Jesus Christ. I saw something in a new book by a Catholic writer this week that seemed like a straw man – putting up a fake argument to knock it down. Some Christians, he claimed, have said: “God required Jesus to suffer a torturous death, so you must see in your own suffering and pain God offering you the same cup.”
I can’t say I’ve come across a Christian who puts things in that way. Some atheists caricature Christian belief as God being cruel to Jesus. But the orthodox Christian belief is that Jesus is God as well as man. God the Father gave up his only Son. A correct formulation would, I think, be to say: “God died on the cross as a human being.”
It is true that Jesus died to save us, but exactly how the mechanism functions (if one can use such a metaphor) is not dogmatically defined by the Church. The insight of brilliant theologians such as Thomas Aquinas is that the damaged relationship between us human beings and God is healed by the fact of the incarnation – by God the Son becoming a man. His life as a baby, child and adult reconciles the human race with God.
The Eastern Church has a strong notion of theosis or deification, shared implicitly by the Western Church. A prayer at Christmas time speaks of a “wonderful exchange”, in which the Word of God by becoming incarnate bestows his Divinity on us. He makes us children of God, and able to share the mysterious life of the Holy Trinity – God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
At the same time, the rejection, suffering and death of Jesus are the sorts of things that happen to good people doing the will of God. That is the fault not only of the people among whom Jesus lived. The correlative of our being healed by his wounds is that by our sins we wound him.
The willingness of God to share our deepest miseries gives an answer to the natural question “Where was God?” when some terrible crime takes place. The answer is: suffering it with us. The life and death of Jesus continue to act in history as it unfold. There is a poetic expression of this in George Mackay Brown’s novel Magnus about the martyr whose violent end sees a telescoping of history, from Abel to the Last Supper, from Calvary to the isle of Egilsay.
It might sound bathetic to liken the giving up of chocolate for Lent to the sufferings of Jesus Christ, but what would one expect? All we have to offer is the quotidian banality of our lives. It gains value by being “offered up” or united with the acts of God Incarnate.