I don't think anybody can deny this part of the year is the spiritual roughest.
When I was young, I didn't know much about Lent or what it was for. Never paid attention. But I knew it was that time of year anyway when every Friday, the sandwiches my mom packed me for lunch would become peanut butter and jelly instead of my favorite ham and cheese, and we would eat fish for dinner instead of the typical things my mom cooked. Neither my mom and I were big fish fans, but for Lent, a bit of battered, deep fried cod and a side of French fries was always welcome.
It wasn't until I started getting more religious that I realized the gravity of this holiday. It wasn't until I became a Christian Witch that I put any thought behind my mom's traditions—lighting a candle at 3PM on Good Friday, namely. And when I finally did realize the story behind the season, by God, was it a blow to the heart.
After all, underneath the commercialized version of Easter we all know, that one random spring holiday seemingly unable to decide where to fall between March and April, it turns out that the forty days preceding it are what give Easter the extra weight it needs to be truly joyous. Because it's not just about Jesus's resurrection: it's about His death, too. His death at the hands of a horrible empire, His suffering for the sake of freedom.
The Explanation of Lent and the Passion Story
Lent is a season of forty days right before Easter, starting on Ash Wednesday. The festival everyone knows about, Mardi Gras (or Fat Tuesday), is actually today, and this is a bit of a last hurrah before Christians lock it down and abstain from rich foods, red meat on Fridays, and from eating in general on both Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Shrovetide, another name for those Fat Tuesday celebrations, is where we celebrate the fact that winter is breaking and party like our life depends on it, with many costumes and carnivals setting up to the point that it almost looks like Halloween. From German Fasching to Slovenian Pust to Italian Carnivale and so much more, it's a time to go wild—until we hit Ash Wednesday.
Ash Wednesday is when we mark our heads with ash from last year's Palm Sunday and remind ourselves: from dust we were made, and to dust we shall return. Our mortality is highlighted, as well as the fact that every moment is fleeting, and that we should choose wisely what we're going to do with these moments. And from there, we proceed on, every Friday remembering the day that Jesus would be fated to die. Remember when I mentioned lighting the candle at 3PM on Good Friday? That's because that is thought to be the day Jesus died, and specifically 3PM is the time, per Matthew 27:45-50:
45 From noon until three in the afternoon darkness came over all the land. 46 About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).
47 When some of those standing there heard this, they said, “He’s calling Elijah.”
48 Immediately one of them ran and got a sponge. He filled it with wine vinegar, put it on a staff, and offered it to Jesus to drink. 49 The rest said, “Now leave him alone. Let’s see if Elijah comes to save him.”
50 And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.
From that point on, the world is in darkness. It's thought, in many folk traditions, that because God is "dead" these three days, that He doesn't see what goes on or what the devil is doing—and so people have often done some pretty wild shenanigans during these times. It almost feels like something of a Christian purge, which is pretty horrifying to think about, really.
But then Easter comes that following Sunday, and the celebration is raucous. With the right church and all the fanfare, it really does feel like war is over, like God is here with us, like we are invincible. That, of course, is precisely the point: that joy, that victory. Because more than Jesus dying for our sins (and therefore giving us a reason to feel real bad for everything we do that isn't in line with what our pastor says), another way of understanding this is that Jesus died to defeat sin, and therefore to defeat death itself, bringing all our ancestors to life in Him as they dwell in heaven beyond the veil, and ridding the world of the grip of sin and death forever. Jesus fundamentally changed the world order that day, and it was for the better.
With all this in mind, naturally, the forty days before Easter are all about becoming better: repenting what we've done and left undone, examining ourselves and taking honest self inventory, and aligning ourselves with the story of Christ and the meaning of His message. It's this latter part, especially, that people seem to have forgotten as they chase those pastel colors of Easter and all the chocolate bunnies to pillage from the grocery store—but that's where the true heart of the Easter season lies.
In recognizing what it was Jesus stood for before His death, and what He did during and after.
The Sociopolitical Significance of Jesus (and Finding Ourselves in His Passion)
Here's the thing: anyone who understands this Passion story knows that Jesus wasn't put on that cross for fun. And anyone who has read the story fully knows that it wasn't Jesus just going around and telling everyone to be nice that made people so mad. If Jesus were truly what so many Christians make Him out to be—purely kind and cozy, toothless, nothing but peaches and cream—then it wouldn't have been very hard for the powers that be to simply ignore Him, would it? In fact, in that era, it wouldn't have been hard for everyone else to ignore Him, either.
Obviously, He was here for so much more than that.
It was the way Jesus challenged the status quo, and threw the false righteousness of so many people back in their faces, that truly sparked a movement that threatened the people in power. It was the way Jesus denied the "hypocrites," the ones who would fast in public and disfigure their faces in expressions of agony for all to see, that made them so upset. When we see Jesus be so joyous in the Gospels, it's not because He's just a happy guy; it's because that very joy in a time of strife, occupation, and cultural diminishing was an act of ironclad resistance to the imperial powers that wanted to break the people's spirits.
Moreover, it was the way Jesus advocated for the least of society at that time—the children, the women, the lepers and beggars and the disabled—that marked Him as subversive in the first place. Jesus wasn't just disliked for what He said; the politically powerful in that area were picking up stones to kill Him with, trying to throw Him off the top of the temple, constantly scheming on how to get rid of Him because He pointed out the bitter flaws in the very ways in which they cosplayed righteousness while leading people into spiritual and moral ruin, like here in Matthew 23:13-19:
13 But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.
14 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.
15 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.
16 Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor!
17 Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifieth the gold?
18 And, Whosoever shall swear by the altar, it is nothing; but whosoever sweareth by the gift that is upon it, he is guilty.
19 Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifieth the gift?
Talking like that, in public, for everyone to see? Boy. Repeatedly, Jesus did this: repeatedly, Jesus stood for the truth of how we should treat one another and spoke to the ways in which people corrupted and twisted the Law for their benefit while leaving those the Law was meant to protect to die. And that sounds so much like today, doesn't it? So damn much.
Recently, I finished reading Mark A. McIntosh's Mystical Theology, and of all the ideas swirling around in that book (that I am still trying to make sense of), one that really stuck out was the idea that the journey of the human soul to unification with God is played out in the story of Jesus Himself: the story of being born, of looking around at a broken world, of learning to speak out against it only to be betrayed and given over to death by those who are too drunk on power and riches and the ability to abuse. And of course, the resurrection through the glory of God, to become our fullest and true selves, forever dedicated to the right course of action. As we think about Lent, and what it meant in Jesus's time, it seems the same story plays out here.
So many people right now are threatened, or feeling threatened, even though they want so badly to do something and speak out against the current situation. We live in a time that does absolutely no justice to the foreigner, that disregards widows and children, that calls people parasites for accessing the communal and social safeguards we should be building up in society rather than trying to take away. So many things are going wrong in this world—wars, poverty, illness, death—and it's easy to feel helpless. It's easy to feel weak and powerless and, even when we do try to do something, it's easy to feel abandoned by the world around us.
However, Jesus knew all along what was coming for Him. He told the Apostles again and again and again; He took up His cross knowing there was no other option. This Lent, I think about that greatly: how it was in what looked like Jesus's defeat that the greatest and most powerful victory imaginable could've come.
From dust we were made and to dust we shall return. More, Jesus says: those who try to preserve their life will lose it, but those who lose their life, who give it up, will live forever. That the greatest love is that which gives itself up for its friends. McIntosh also points out in Mystical Theology that our true humanity, our fully realized personhood, comes not from the ego or the sense of "I" we create, but our relatioship to the Other: our capacity for giving ourselves up for others, for the Other, and therefore being defined by that everlasting self-giving, just as God is defined as the Father and the Son by Their relational giving and receiving of one another, Their pouring out of Themselves for the Other—for us, too. And all this, it makes me think: what is this life, except a series of tests to see how, and when, and where, and why, we will make the choice to give up our comfort and our peace and our safety for something more? Is it any wonder, then, that Jesus tells us to leave our mothers and brothers, our fathers and daughters, our husbands and wives, behind? How can we fully take on such a task as Jesus did, pick up a cross like Jesus did, with attachments stopping us from fully surrendering ourselves?
Of course, I say this as a hypocrite myself. I can't fly in front of a bullet for people. I can't throw my life away for whatever I see as the right thing to do. I have too many of my own attachments to do such a thing, especially as I consider the impact of my actions on others. But there is still something we can do. This isn't an all or nothing game, where we either stay silent in the face of tyranny or get ourselves nailed to a cross and left to die for a better cause.
In the story of Jesus's life, I see so many places where the everyday person can stand up for what they believe in: where we can reflect, deeply, on what it means to speak truth to power. We can be there for our communities with almsgiving and volunteer service; we can create spaces for our friends to vent and cry and be afraid; we can march and protest and speak with our whole chest, with our name signed onto our every statement. We can refuse to back down, refuse to be intimidated, refuse to be bent, by the powers of such an unjust world.
During the Lenten season, this is about more than just waiting around for Easter eggs and spiral ham. This is about more, even, than giving up some chocolate for forty days and having some meatless Fridays. This is about understanding the gravity of Jesus's walk, and seeing the ways in which it mirrors the walks of so many people living in this cruel world right now. It's about understanding the ways in which we fail our communities everyday, and how we can try, try, try again to do justice by it instead.
It's a lifelong walk. An eternal journey. We won't figure it out in just one and a half months. But every cycle, every call to remember, is a call to progress this learning just one more step. Let us honor Christ's sacrifice this Lent—and let us have the courage to see our own walks in His, that we might be more and more emboldened to keep giving, acting, healing, and speaking.
Amen.
Sara Raztresen is a Slovene-American writer, screenwriter, and Christian witch. Her fantasy works draw heavily on the wisdom she gathers from her own personal and spiritual experience, and her spiritual practice borrows much of the whimsy and wonder that modern society has relegated to fairy-and-folktale. Her goal is to help people regain their spiritual footing and discover God through a new (yet old) lens of mysticism.
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