This Sunday, the Church entered Gesima-tide. Or at least it would have done, if Gesima-tide hadn’t been widely abolished. In the 1970s, the Roman Catholic church decided that the Gesima Sundays were too obscure, and in any case sometimes they clash with Epiphany season, and even when they don’t they potentially detract from Lent. The Church of England followed suit in Common Worship and so now most Catholic or Anglican Churches have gone into ordinary time – last Sunday being the Third Sunday before Lent.

So you could be forgiven for thinking that Gesima-tide was something I’d just made up as an early April fools’ day prank. In researching this post, I found that one of Google’s most commonly searched questions about Gesima-tide is ‘what is a Gesima?’

The Gesima Sundays are three Sundays, Septuagesima, Sexagesima and Quinquagesima. They mark the Sundays when it is, respectively, 70ish, 60ish and 50ish days until Easter. But really they are about preparing for Lent. Ash Wednesday is the Wednesday after Quinquagesima, so the season (if it counts as a full blown season) is just two and a half weeks. And lots of the themes of the period are connected to Lent and the fasting that traditionally goes along with that.

As far as I can see, the Gesimas have not been much missed outside of traditionalist Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran circles*. Even when they existed John Betjeman described them as “A somewhat unattractive time/which hardly lends itself to rhyme”.

But, while hopefully not falling into the trap of a grumpy traditionalism, I love gesima-tide and am willing to assert that it is the very best liturgical season that nobody has ever heard of. Because, as an Evangelical, Gesima tide is the place where the calendar anticipates all your objections to Lent in advance and sets you straight.

Depending on which part of the Church you identify with you might not know that there are churches which object to Lent. It’s the only part of the calendar which I have been actively discouraged from observing by people in leadership at an Anglican church. The objections are many, but I won’t rehearse them now. Perhaps when Lent arrives.

It seems to me that the theme of the Gesima collects is to clear up misunderstandings of what fasting and having a penitential season are all about. The collect for Septuagesima is:

O Lord, we beseech thee favourably to hear the prayers of thy people; that we, who are justly punished for our offences, may be mercifully delivered by thy goodness, for the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Saviour, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

Septuagesima is the first Sunday where the prayer book gently drops into your mind the idea that Lent is on the way. And this collect should hopefully dispel the idea that Lent is an exercise in accruing merit so that God somehow owes us. We approach Lent as sinners. Individual sinners and a church of sinners. We are not pleading our merits, but asking God for his favour, mercy, goodness.

Out of context you might find this collect a fairly vanilla, or even somewhat dreary confession of sin and prayer for grace. In its context, however, it is about making sure that the first thing you think as you think of Lent is that it is nothing to do with impressing God with your ascetic efforts. Lent is about repentance, which means it is ultimately about God’s mercy for sinners, his undeserved favour and grace.

And just in case you don’t get that from the collect, the prayer book lectionary means your vicar will preach on the parable of the workers in the field (Matt 20:1-16). This parable, in which the owner of a field gives the same wages to those who work all day as he does to those who are recruited with only an hour to go, is one we often find difficult. It rankles with our natural sense of fairness and is not something we would likely approve of in a real world employer. But that is the point of the parable, to radically undercut the idea that the Kingdom is anything like an employer employee relationship. What we receive from God in the Kingdom is not a wage, but a gift.

In this way, Septuagesima is intended to radically undercut an all too common error in our thinking about Lent. As we prepare ourselves for a season of repentance, we are not seeking to earn a wage, but asking to receive an undeserved gift.

* While researching this I did find an article by a relatively prominent American Lutheran pastor suggesting that the suppression of the Gesima weeks was further proof that the Pope is the antichrist, but I think he was joking…?