The First Sunday of Lent
William Zambrano MD
VIDEO: The First Sunday of Lent — From Dom Guéranger’s Liturgical Year
Lent confronts us with essentials. It takes us, materially and symbolically, into a space stripped of superfluities. Things apt to distract us, even things wholesome in themselves, are removed for a season. We embrace an abstinence of the senses.
Fidelity to Christ’s example and commandments is the hallmark of Christian sincerity. The extent of the peace we embody — that signal peace ‘which the world cannot give’ — indicates Jesus’s abiding presence in us. We must insist on this now, when the Gospel is sometimes deployed as a weapon in culture wars.
Instrumentalisations of Christian language and signs should be challenged, not just by wan outrage, but by teaching the terms of authentic spiritual warfare. For Christian peace is not a promise of ease; it is a condition for transformed society.
It is timely to articulate the radicality of Christian ‘peace’ while we remind ourselves and others of the truth in St John Climacus’s words: ‘There is no greater obstacle to the presence of the Spirit in us than anger.’
The Church instils our Lenten programme with peace. She detracts nothing from her call to do battle against vices and harmful passions — her language is ‘Yes, yes’, ‘No, no’, not ‘sometimes this’, ‘sometimes that’.
She gives us instead, as we start each Lent’s battle, a peaceful melody as a seasonal soundtrack: a tract of great beauty that, for over a thousand years, the Church has sung on the First Sunday of Lent, to introduce the account of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness.
The tract sets the text of Psalm 90, the Qui habitat. This work of melodic exegesis deserves attention. It is not just a relic of ancient aesthetics. It carries a vital message.
St Bernard of Clairvaux was attentive to this message. In the Lent of 1139 he preached a cycle of 17 sermons on the Qui habitat, reflecting on what it means to live by grace as we fight evil, foster good, uphold truth, and follow the exodus path from unfreedom towards the land of promise, veering neither to the right nor to the left, remaining peaceful, conscious that underneath what may at times seem to us a tight-rope walk ‘are the everlasting arms’.
He summons us to loving and clear-headed discipleship.