If you’re a Christian, and you don’t belong to one of the traditions which rejects the Church Calendar on principle, this is almost certainly the one part of the calendar you’ve already engaged with at a spiritual level. Holy Week is here and, rather embarrassingly, I’m still two weeks behind on the collects. So here’s the plan – today and tomorrow I catch up on collects and then from Wednesday to Sunday I cover Holy Week. Sound good?

You might think relief is an odd choice of title for Lent IV, given the way the collect begins:

GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that we, who for our evil deeds do worthily deserve to be punished, by the comfort of thy grace may mercifully be relieved; through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

Once more, the collect focusses on our desperate human need for grace. We’ve looked at it from several angles over the last few weeks, but this week it seems to me it hits the most bluntly. We have committed evil deeds. We deserve to be punished. There really is no sugarcoating the matter. Lent is one long ‘guilty’ plea in that regard.

And indeed, a superficial glance at this collect might confirm your worst suspicions about Christianity, that it is one long, agonising guilt trip. Four weeks into Lent and it is still doom and gloom. There is little sense from this collect that any progress has been made. We are still the same sinners we were when we started the season. How unutterably depressing!

And yet the paradox is that Lent IV is traditionally the jolliest Sunday of them all. It has a number of traditional names – Laetare Sunday (from a word meaning to rejoice) and refreshment Sunday being the most common. It’s also Mothering Sunday in the UK. Its liturgical colour is rose (i.e. pink) because it is lighter than the traditional purple of the penitential seasons. Lenten discipline is relaxed on this Sunday even further than is usual for Sundays. What on earth is going on?

Well, at the crudest level, Lent IV is when Easter starts to appear on the horizon. It’s almost the midpoint in Lent. Three and a half weeks down, three weeks to go. So it is a day, essentially, to take a break from Lent and refresh for the second half.

But the collect provides its own answer as well. It’s a prayer that we would be mercifully relieved through the comfort of God’s grace. The word for ‘relieved’ in the Latin is the origin of the name ‘refreshment Sunday’.* Lent is not a time of despair. Or if it is a time of despair in ourselves it should be a time of renewed faith in God’s grace. The more the season presses on our conscience the fact that no half measures will do when it comes to our need for grace, the more the Gospel answers that the grace of God is no half measure. Where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more (Rom 5:21). Christians know that this is a prayer God will answer yes to. The perfect active obedience of Christ that started the season and the perfect passive obedience with which we will end guarantee it.**

This year my wife and I did something we haven’t done that might become a family tradition. Because it was also St Patrick’s day weekend, we had Irish stew for dinner. I quite liked the way that having something with lamb in gave a nod to the fact that Easter is on the way, and we might make that part of how we celebrate refreshment Sunday in future.

*According to Zahl and Barbee, The Collects of Thomas Cranmer.

**Put simply, in Reformed theology Christ’s active obedience is everything he did in living a perfectly righteous life. His passive obedience is everything he suffered on the cross for our redemption.