Articles - From the Vicar

March 2000

The annual celebration of the death and resurrection of Jesus is what defines us as a Christian community: we are the Easter people. From the earliest times Christians have understood that appropriate preparation for Easter is important and by the 4th century the six week period of Lent had become, more or less, the norm. Hundreds of years later Lent continues to provide Christians with the opportunity for reflection and preparation so that we come to our Easter celebrations with a heightened awareness of what God has done for us in Christ.

Self-denial has often featured prominently in the Christian observance of Lent. I recently came across a story in the writings of the early Jewish rabbis that gave me a new perspective on self-denial:

One day Simeon ben Sheta asked his servant to go to the market and buy him a donkey. The servant did as he was asked and soon came back with a donkey which he had bought from its owner. When the rabbi's disciples came to examine the ass they found a precious jewel suspended from the animal's neck. They ran to congratulate their master on his good fortune and cried out, "Praised be God who has sent you this great fortune!" But Simeon thought otherwise about the unexpected find. "I bought only the ass, and not this precious stone" he said, and he himself went back to the owner to make certain that the jewel was returned to him. When the owner realised what Simeon had done for him he was overcome with admiration for the Jewish teacher and exclaimed, "Praised be the God of Simeon ben Sheta!"

What this story teaches, among other things, is the importance of not exploiting good fortune at the expense of denying others justice. Lent might be an appropriate time for us to apply this principle in the decisions we make about what we buy: the cheap food, available to us only as a result of the exploitation of labour in the developing world; the cheap clothes, produced in sweat shops whose owners pay little heed to their workers' health and safety; the cheap fossil fuels and minerals, extracted at an environmental cost that exposes much of the world's population to the hazards of pollution and land degradation. The paradox of our self-denial this Lent might be that, for the world as a whole, less means more. That, in turn, might encourage the poor of the earth to shout the praises of the God whose Kingdom values we claim to espouse.