Lent: The Bride Returns to Her Bridegroom

By: Fr. Andy Younan

The season of Lent, or Soma Raba, begins on the first Sunday of February this year. It is, like Advent or Subara, a season of preparation; where Advent was a preparation for Christmas, Lent is the preparation for Holy Week, and especially for the Great Feast of the Resurrection of the Lord. How does the Church prepare for such an awesome remembrance? And even more importantly, why does the Church prepare? As always, we look to the prayers of the Chaldean Church of the East for our answer.

 

The Bride of Christ

It is curious that the “Basilica” hymn of the first and last Sunday of Lent is the same, and that it contains no reference to fasting or penance:

O Lord, behold your Church, saved by your Cross,

and your flock bought with your precious Blood,

offers a crown of thanksgiving in faith to you,

O High Priest of justice who has exalted her by your abasement.

And, like a glorious Bride, she rejoices and exults in you, O glorious Bridegroom.

In the strength of the Truth, raise the walls of her salvation,

and establish priests within her,

to be ambassadors of peace on behalf of her children.

Fasting and penance are not ends in themselves; they are not things we do for their own sake. We fast and do penance for a higher reason, and the moment this reason is forgotten, we become as ignorant of God’s ways as was the Pharisee who stood before God and bragged about his fasting practices: “I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.” (Lk 18:12). To brag about our fasting as if it alone made us holy is exactly to miss the point: we fast in order to become humble; we do penance in order to see our sins more clearly and beg forgiveness for them, so that God may erase them and make of his Church a fitting bride. The point of fasting and penance and repentance, the point of Lent, is for the Bride of Christ to lose, by the grace of her Spouse, all the excess weight of her sins, in order to fit into the white garment of her wedding day in heaven.

 

The Example of Christ

The hymn of the second Sunday of Lent is a litany of thanksgiving to the Lord who has given us such marvelous favors:

Come, let us all give thanks and glorify our good God,

as much as we are able, for his benefits to our race:

honor him for our establishment, from the beginning,

in the Name of his honorable Image;

and, when the enemy envied our honor and cast us out of our glory,

[the Lord] was revealed to us, and spoke to us in his Son,

who is the Inheritance and Progenitor of the world to come;

in whose birth gathered us from the error of ignorance

to the knowledge of his Divinity;

who was baptized and gave us a true adoption;

who fasted and gave encouragement to our weariness that we might overcome Satan;

in whose death conquered the tyrant;

and who justified us, lifted us up and raised us with him in glory.

Interestingly, the reference to fasting near the end is in the midst of a list of graces given to us by God through Christ. This suggests two points: first, any merit that may come from our fasting is, like all the good we can ever do in life, the work of God’s grace, and not our own. That is, if there is any spiritual growth that comes from our fast, it occurs only because of God’s grace working through an activity he taught us by example. This is the second point, and answers the question posed above of why we fast: we fast because Christ fasted.

 

The Mercy of Christ

Of the many immediate effects of fasting and penance, the one which is the subject of the third Sunday’s hymn, is repentance: an acute awareness of one’s sins and utter reliance on God’s mercy for their forgiveness.

If you enter into judgment with your servant, O Lord God,

what excuse will I find? And how can I beg for forgiveness?

For I have rejected and broken all your laws,

and have become a dead man in the greatness of my sins.

As from Sheol, from the sea of sin draw me out, in your mercy:

O Christ the King, have mercy on me!

Here the author takes up the voice of the repentant sinner, and accuses himself of committing every sin and breaking every one of God’s laws. This state leaves him, leaves us, pitifully unable to make any excuse or apology, and hardly able even to beg for forgiveness. Indeed, before God’s Goodness, how can any sinful human being dare to think himself good, or make excuses for his sins? Is this not truly the greatest arrogance? Counter to this, the author of this prayer humbly acknowledges his unworthiness and misery as he stands before God’s judgment seat. His appeal, which is our appeal, is to God’s mercy, which raises those dead in their sins to new life.

 

We have seen, then, how unthankful is mankind to God – how, in return for his immeasurable graces and gifts, every human being, save the Lord himself and his mother, turns away from God and throws his gifts away through sin. But even in the face of such an insult, the merciful Creator never gives up on his children; rather, even after they have wounded themselves and made themselves sick in sin, he welcomes and heals them.

 

Distraction: The Creature Betrays the Creator

After the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden, the mind of the human being, the peak of creation, became darkened; the worship of the one true God was left behind for polytheism: creatures were confused for the Creator. The Basilica hymn for the fourth Sunday of Lent reflects on this reality:

This world, in its construction,

daily prepares and awakens rational creatures

to the wonder and glory of that wise Creator.

The wondrous variations, which oppose one another,

harmonize within it: fire, water, earth and sinuous air.

But that we may not be led astray and think

that, because of their diversity they have many makers,

he took and made, of creation, one body in the forming of man,

and in him made known to us that he is the Lord of all.

In this we discover how grievous is the sin of polytheism: God the Creator, in his Providence, knew that the multiplicity of creatures could be confusing, and so gathered the whole creation together and summed it up in his final work: the human being. This is, in the Chaldean Tradition, the meaning of the idea that man is the “Image of God:” that, in his ruling and taking care of the physical world, man reflects the Ultimate Ruler and Caregiver. And so the grievousness of polytheism is made manifest: the Lord gave us a clear sign of his Oneness in order to clear the confusion made possible by the multiplicity of creatures, and no one need look very far to find this sign, for it is in his very self! This is the manner in which sin strengthens its hold on the soul: by darkening the mind of man so much that he forgets the God which he himself reflects.

 

Dispersion: Looking to Fill the Void

Darkness having fallen upon the soul of man, he begins to seek a way to find light again. Unfortunately, his blindness causes him to reach, not for the true Light of the Creator, but for that which is just within his grasp: the meager light of creatures. It is a fitting metaphor: when one is walking in darkness, his immediate instinct is to hold on to the first thing he can find. The problem is that this grasp onto creatures is insufficient to enlighten the soul created solely for God himself; no creature is enough to fulfill him who is the image of the Creator:

The whole span of my life disperses and vanishes vainly

in the confusion of the vanities of the world;

while I have not, for one hour,

desired to prepare myself for tackling work in the spiritual vineyard,

I do not expect to receive the wage prepared for the just.

But, for the hidden wounds of my sins,

I ask forgiveness from you, unworthy though I am,

and because of this, before I stand before your frightful judgment-seat

and am found guilty of my crimes by your just judgment,

say the word, and I will be healed by your mercies:

O Lover of mankind, glory to you!

In our darkness, we seek to salve our wounds in rest and pleasure – in the vanities of this world. But this temporary drug to soothe to our deepest pain runs short and ends, and we find ourselves not only empty, but running out of time, for we know, deep within our hearts, that we will be judged for what we have done with the graces God has given us.

 

The Doctor: The Bride Finds Her Healing

It is in this miserable state that the bride of Christ finds herself. The Church is sick and bleeding in her sins – she has caught so many diseases in her unfaithfulness to Christ that she is on the verge of death. But the Divine Physician does not leave her so, but comes to her in her sin and heals her of every malady. This is true universally of the Church, and particularly of every individual soul which is called to be wedded to God. It finds its expression Biblically in the healings performed by Christ in the Gospels, and these themes are all drawn together in the hymn for the Sixth Sunday of Lent:

“Who is the doctor who can cleanse my hidden wounds?

O, will he be able to heal and to cure [them]?

O who will be able to deliver me from the fire?”

[thus] cried the adulteress.

“I will unravel the tangles of sin,

and draw near to the Lord and Savior.”

For indeed, he did not cast the tax-collector away from him,

and with his speech, he converted the Samaritan woman.

With his word, he gave life to the Canaanite woman,

and to the hemorrhaging woman he gave healing with the hem of his cloak.

With his merciful word, he freed the adulteress from her sins,

and summoned her to the book of life with the holy women.

And with these people, my soul says, at all times:

Blessed is the Messiah our Savior!

The idea of gender is noteworthy in this prayer – most of the works mentioned are done for the sake of women, and the soul of the author places itself in their stead (recall also that nawsha, “soul” in Syriac, is a feminine noun). This fact, I believe, should be understood in reference to the Bridegroom/Bride imagery predominant in the Bible, from the Prophets to the Gospels to the Epistles. Again, both in the first and in the last Basilica hymn of Lent, this imagery takes the forefront:

O Lord, behold your Church, saved by your Cross,

and your flock bought with your precious Blood,

offers a crown of thanksgiving in faith to you,

O High Priest of justice who has exalted her by your abasement.

And, like a glorious Bride, she rejoices and exults in you, O glorious Bridegroom.

In the strength of the Truth, raise the walls of her salvation,

and establish priests within her,

to be ambassadors of peace on behalf of her children.

Christ is the glorious Bridegroom who became flesh and gave his very life – his Body and Blood – for the sake of his bride. It is only in his Blood that she is washed and made clean, and it is in his Body, given for her on the Cross and sacramentally present in the Eucharist, that she is united to him perfectly.