Getting Ready for Lent
But the question which Christ asks us is this: Are you human or sub-human? In other words, are you capable of love or not? I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was naked, I was in prison, I was ill. What did you do about it? Were you able to respond with your heart to my misery, were you able to respond at a cost and with all your humanity – or not? At this point we must remember what we have said before concerning the Pharisee and the Publican. Christ does not ask us to fulfill the law. He will not count the number of loaves of bread and of cups of water and the number of visits we pay to hospitals and so forth. He will measure our heart’s response. And this is made clear from the words of Christ in another part of St John’s Gospel, where he says, ‘And when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, we are unprofitable servants’. The doing means nothing. We become human at the moment when, like the Publican, like the Prodigal Son, we have entered into the realm of broken-heartedness, into the realm of love which is a response both to divine love and to human suffering. This cannot be measured. We can never, on that level, say, ‘I am safe. I will come to the judgment and be one of the sheep’, because it will not be a question of whether or not we have accomplished the law, but whether this law has become so much ourselves that it has grown into the mystery of love.
There, at that point, we will be on the fringe, on the very threshold of entering into that spring of life, that renewal of life, that newness of all things, which is Lent. We will have gone through all these stages of judgment, and will have emerged from blindness and from the law into a vision of the mysterious relationship which may be called ‘mercy’ or ‘grace’. And we will be face to face with being human. But we must remember that to be human does not mean to be ‘like us’ but ‘like Christ’. With this we can enter Lent and begin to experience through the readings of the Church, through the prayers of the Church, through the process of repentance, that discovery of the acts of divine grace which alone can lead us towards growth into the full stature of the likeness of Christ. I have brought you to the gate. Now you must walk into it.
Metropolitian Anthony Bloom