Isaiah 55: 1-9 Luke 13: 1-9
Lest we slacken in our observance of a holy Lent, Jesus stirs us up with some strong words in this morning’s gospel reading.
Political conflict and the death of Galileans at the hands of Herod and the collapse of a building and the death of people in the district of Siloam – unexpected deaths that should give Jesus’s disciples, including us, pause for thought.
What does it mean to die unprepared?
In the Litany in the Book of Common Prayer, we ask God to spare us from sudden death. In the equivalent Litany in Common Worship, the petition has changed to a request to be spared from dying unprepared.
In part, this change reflected the fact that, all things being equal and after a good life, most of us would probably prefer sudden death but that’s not what the Prayer Book Litany was trying to avoid. The author of the Litany as we find it in the Prayer Book has an eye to Jesus’s teaching in this morning’s gospel reading: dying without repentance, without remorse, without absolution. The way in which the petition in the Common Worship Litany has shifted the emphasis of the request gets the meaning right.
Confession and Absolution are key components of our worship. They are a liturgical ‘sine qua non’ rather like the Lord’s Prayer is an essential component of a good liturgical act of worship.
And they take an added depth and poignancy during Lent. We mark the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday with those words repeated by the priest as each worshipper comes up to receive the sign of the cross in ash on their foreheads: ‘turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.’ In the light of this morning’s gospel reading, one might add ‘and thereby you will die prepared.’
Liturgical confession and absolution can be somewhat formulaic. The corporate prayers we use for confession might occasionally trip off the tongue all too easily. They’re no bad thing because familiar expressions oft repeated get under the skin and our subconscious may take them up more effectively than we realise. They’re also good because we say them together: the most destructive sin is usually corporate rather than individual – poverty, famine and warfare prove time and time again just how sinful sinfulness is and they are sins at which most of us connive either consciously or unconsciously.
Nevertheless, we shouldn’t miss the opportunity which Lent affords the Christian to do some soul-searching and ask ourselves the question, ‘Will I die unprepared?’ It’s not an easy question to ask – not least because we might feel rather helpless about what to do if we think the answer might be yes.
The parable of the fig tree at the end of today’s gospel reading is helpful. It’s a parable of compassion which may be a source of comfort to the disciple who stumbles along the Christian Way.
On the other hand, time is running out, and it might be a parable of crisis – lighting a fire under procrastinators and other unproductive disciples.
Isaiah is at his most compassionate in this morning’s Old Testament reading but even he talks about calling upon the Lord ‘while he is near’.
But he also reminds us that God will abundantly pardon.
The Gospel is rich in stories about the need to repent – to turn round and face Christ. The story of the woman who has committed adultery sees Jesus save her from death by stoning but the cathartic moment when the grim old religious men walk away might eclipse the fact that Jesus tells her to sin no more. The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector hits the nail on the head when the Pharisee’s confident claims to holiness of life and righteousness of living are eclipsed by the tax collector’s plea that God will forgive him, a sinner.
So it may be that the urgent note in this morning’s readings give us the impetus to use Lent to reflect on whether we will die prepared or unprepared but the compassion articulated by Isaiah and by Jesus give us the reassurance that we can turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.
And that might mean more than the liturgical formulae for confession and absolution, important and useful though they are. It may mean taking seriously the call of our liturgy of Ash Wednesday to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word.