As I type, tomorrow will be Ash Wednesday. Lent will have begun and the brief ‘gesima’ season will be over.

While the first two ‘gesima’ collects are lightly edited from the ancient ones Cranmer inherited from the medieval church, Cranmer decided to write the one we would hear for the last three days before Lent began himself. That’s partly because the medieval one focusses on sacramental penance (from which ‘Shrove Tuesday’ gets its name, ‘to shrive’ being an old word for to hear someone’s confession). But it also presumably reflects the note Cranmer wants us to enter Lent reflecting on. Here’s what he came up with:

O Lord, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth: Send thy Holy Ghost, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee. Grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

This collect makes an extremely important pastoral point which also anticipates another common Evangelical objection to Lent. One source of modern Evangelical suspicion, not only towards Lent in particular, but towards fasting as a spiritual discipline in general, is the way we associate it with a certain kind of ascetic spirituality. Fasting, a bodily act, is one which we are tempted to think of little spiritual worth.

This is all the more so with Lent as it takes place at a fixed time. We Evangelicals, in line with much of modern western culture, can all too easily assume that it is the spontaneous and unscripted which is truly sincere. That which is planned and scripted (especially, as in the case of most liturgical traditions, scripted by someone else) is often assumed to be done largely by rote.

Not only does Lent take place at a fixed time, but over the course of the 20th century* it has become increasingly trivialised. Whether you give it a relatively high or low value in your spirituality, any Evangelical Christian should be able to acknowledge that fasting is a practise the Bible endorses in at least some circumstances.** It’s much harder to see what immediate spiritual value there is in abstaining from chocolate for six weeks. While it’s probably a good thing on balance that the Church of England leaves it largely up to the individual to decide how exactly to observe Lent, that has undeniably led to a significantly watered down version of what the Reformers had in mind.

Cranmer appears to anticipate some of these objections to Lent. Certainly, in his day, he would have been familiar with forms of piety which appeared to suggest that abstention from certain foods during Lent was meritorious in and of itself. Doubtless, he would also know that many ordinary people observed Lent because that was the rule and they had to keep it.

Cranmer’s collect is intended to discourage such attitudes before Lent even begins. It reminds us of the Scriptural teaching (perhaps most clearly expressed in 1 Cor 13) that any action carried out without charity, (in the older sense of agape love) is worthless. Those who lack love are dead before the Lord, even while they live. If Lent is merely to be abstinence for abstinence’s sake, it has no value. The entire point of Lent, of abstinence and a focus on repentance, of self examination and confession of sin, of giving more time to prayer or to the study of Scripture, is that we might grow in our love for God and for our neighbour. If it doesn’t do that it is worth nothing. Love is the sine qua non of a good Lent. Without love, Lent is an elaborate ritual of spiritual death. Not only today, but throughout Lent we must pray for God’s work on our hearts to renew in us the power to love.***

Gesima-tide comes to a close tonight. We don’t have particularly distinctive family traditions for today – my wife and I will be enjoying pancakes. The only slight twist is that thanks to our family’s Anglo-Polish identity we will be enjoying placki (which is pronounced more like ‘platsky’) which are a kind of Polish potato pancake similar to a latke, alongside the more usual crêpes.

As we go into Lent, the Gesima collects remind us of three core truths that should characterise our attitude to what we are doing:

• We are sinners in need of grace and forgiveness (Septuagesima)
• We do not put our trust in anything that we do (Sexagesima)
• All our doings without charity are nothing worth (Quinquagesima)

It may be worth writing those down somewhere and coming back to them as you go through Lent. They’re easily forgotten, but each one closes the door to a distortion of what the penitential season is all about.

*In all honesty, I have no idea when wider British culture stopped thinking about Lent as being about fasting and started to associate it with things like abstaining from chocolate or putting money in the swear jar. I’ve just assumed it mostly happened in the 20th Century.

**To give full credit where it is due, I think probably 98% of everything I have ever been taught about fasting comes from Free Church sources like Martyn Lloyd Jones and John Piper. These men stand in honourable Christian traditions that have tended to object to Lent on principle, because of the underlying theology of worship in those traditions. Nonetheless, they appreciate fasting and the value placed on it in the Bible, and their traditions have developed their own ways of incorporating it into their spirituality. My concern for my own constituency is that modern conservative evangelical Anglicans often eschew Lent for quite different reasons and, having got rid of the way our tradition historically fasted, have failed to replace it with some other way of honouring Scripture’s teaching in this area. As a result, fasting is barely practised or taught about at all.

***For more on how love and repentance relate to each other in Cranmer’s thinking, especially by contrast with the inherited late medieval approaches to repentance, I highly recommend Ashley Null’s Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance: Renewing the Power to Love.