This year I discovered that Lent V ushers in a sort of season within a season called Passiontide. I must admit I hadn’t really clocked that as it’s one of those ‘not in my prayer book’ things.* I’ll have to look into it some more for next year. In the meantime, the BCP collect for this week is another one that’s brief and to the point:

WE beseech thee, Almighty God, mercifully to look upon thy people; that by thy great goodness they may be governed and preserved evermore, both in body and soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

One of the things that stood out to me this week was that this collect is inescapably communal. I think I had slightly fallen into the tendency to read the other collects as though the ‘we’ in each of them was ‘us’ considered as an agglomeration of individuals. In this week’s collect, we are explicitly beseeching God’s mercy as a people.

This collect has been a helpful reminder for me of the communal dimension of our sinfulness. As I fall short of everything God calls me to be, one element of that is that I fail to be for others the person they need me to be for their own growth and maturity. Likewise, the sins and struggles of others are not simply their problem, they affect me also. We are all more profoundly interdependent than we often realise. As Paul says, we are one body, so if one member is sick, the whole body suffers (1 Cor 12). The prophet Isaiah lamented not only that he was a man of unclean lips, but that he dwelt among a people of unclean lips (Isaiah 6).

Lent, then, is a time when we ‘worthily lament our sins and acknowledge our wretchedness’. Not just each of ours individually, but also ours as a people. Scripture pronounces a blessing on those who mourn over the state of God’s people as a whole (Isaiah 61:1-3).

In this collect we ask God to turn a merciful eye towards us as his people and govern us. Along with the mercies of forgiveness, protection and relief, this week’s collect asks for a communal mercy for a communal problem. At the very least, we are asking that God would continue the providential guidance he has always given the church so that, however bad it gets, the Gospel is never completely lost. That fits well with the combination of the church being governed and preserved. This isn’t just a plea for the continued preservation of the saints as individuals, it is addressed on a communal level. We are asking, confident in God’s mercy, that God’s people never fully, finally, go off the rails.

But there may be more to it than that. In asking God to govern his people, we are asking, in effect, that God’s Kingdom would come. Of course, in Jesus it has already come, but as we consider the wretched state of God’s people we have ample cause to plead that it would come in greater measure. Granted, as prayers for revival go, it is rather muted, but the final goal of God’s government is the establishment of his kingdom.

*Something not being in the prayer book doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad, just that it’s exponentially more likely that I don’t know about it.