Wrestling with the Word‐I

Extract

For the next three weeks, as Lent builds up more intensively towards Easter, the gospel readings at Sunday Mass abandon the ordinary course of readings for the year (Luke this year) and go over to John. And that for a very good reason, which is internal to the gospel according to John. What Lent is all about, as we have been seeing this last couple of weeks, is a longish preparation for Easter—a preparation that once was the final spurt of adults preparing to be baptized during Easter night, and then also of already baptized Christians who had fallen away in some pretty serious regard and were now getting ready to come back to the heart of the Christian community on Maundy Thursday, and then finally a sort of extended retreat for the whole Christian people. Because everybody realized that they all needed to come back closer to the heart of things—every Christian had fallen away to some degree, every Christian was in some way an internal emigré—they realized that they all had to come back closer to the heart of things, and that meant recovering something of their first flush of enthusiasm and their first entry into the Church, their baptism. And baptism from the beginning was an Easter affair, an Easter affair even before there was an Easter kept as an annual feast; already in the New Testament letters, baptism was seen as a sharing in Christ’s death and in his being raised again.