A Sure Prayer for Lent

“Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent: create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we worthily lamenting our sins, and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

The 1662 Book of Common Prayer, still the official liturgy of the Church of England and the foundation for Anglican worship around the world, appoints this prayer to be prayed daily throughout the season of Lent: once each at morning and evening prayer, and at every celebration of the Lord’s Supper besides. For the last decade or so, this prayer has become the twice-daily rhythm of my Lenten practice, the scaffolding upon which the rest of my Lenten observance of prayers, scripture reading, fasting, and penitence has been built. I have come to find it enormously helpful for what it teaches about how to keep a holy Lent, a Lent less about self-exertion and more about surrendering to God’s work in me.

We sometimes think of Lent as a time for intense spiritual athleticism, for bold ascetic endeavors in self-mortification, for proving to ourselves and God just how holy and pious we are. At least, I know that I do. This way of thinking about Lent can lead us to thinking that our acts of penitence really do something good for God, something that deserves or merits his favor, perhaps even something necessary for enjoying divine pleasure and goodwill. For those of us who like to think that we earn our place in the world and in the lives of our loved ones by dutiful hard work, this thought can be almost irresistible. And if taken to heart, it can result in a Lent of rapid alterations between self-satisfaction when we think we’re practicing piety well and utter despair when we slip up. On the other hand, for those who come to Lent already exhausted and overwhelmed by the chaos of the world or their own lives, there’s a temptation to cede Lent to those advanced in piety, to put it off for another year when things are feeling more settled and secure. Lent, according to this understanding, isn’t for the weak and weary in spirit, and can happily be skipped in the name of self-care.

Tom Thomson, Spring Ice, oil on canvas, 1915–1916.

But from its very first clauses, this prayer seeks to disrupt this understanding of Lent and to help us see things differently. It is not a prayer for spiritual athletes seeking to earn God’s favor by mighty effort of will. Rather, it teaches us that Lent is not about us working for God, but rather about God lovingly working in us: humbling us to make room for him and his salvation, putting us to death in order to bring us to new and unending life.

The prayer begins by announcing that God hates nothing that he has made. This, it reminds us, is God’s fundamental orientation toward us: not hatred in need of being soothed by righteous action, but love. That is, Lent starts with God’s love. Indeed, the Lenten season is an expression of God’s love to us, a means that our loving God uses to draw us to accept his freely offered forgiveness and new life and enter into that new life in grateful response. This does not mean that God’s love is always pleasant and easy to bear. Just like a physical therapist might sometimes have to prescribe a painful set of activities to help us recover from an injury, so God must lead us through pain and suffering to restore us to spiritual health. “Take up your cross,” Jesus says. But the aim is our good, and its foundation is God’s love.

Then, having begun with an expression of God’s love for us, the prayer goes on to ask God for the very repentance in response to which God forgives sins. This prayer does not say, “God, look at how devoutly penitent we have worked ourselves up to be, and so forgive us our sins.” It doesn’t even say, “Help us to be more penitent than we already are.” No: echoing the psalmist’s prayer in Psalm 51, drawing upon God’s promise to his people in Ezekiel 36, we pray “create and make in us new and contrite hearts.”

What this means is that the work of Lenten repentance, of “worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness,” is not really our work at all. It’s not something that we do and then God accepts. It’s not even something that we start under our own power and then ask God’s help to perfect and complete. We don’t pray, “Improve our heart just a little bit so that we can worthily lament our sins and acknowledge our wretchedness.” We say instead, “Create and make in us new and contrite hearts.” The repentance that we do during Lent – the repentance that makes up the entirety of the Christian life – is grounded not in our own ability but in the gracious creative power of God who “gives life to the dead and calls into being things that are not” (Rom. 4:17).

It is not that we shouldn’t lament our sins and acknowledge our wretchedness. The good news that our salvation is a matter of God’s agency and not our own does not mean that we can just let ourselves off the hook, decide that Lent isn’t worth it this year, that repentance is unnecessary. Quite the opposite. As Martin Luther says in the first of his famous Ninety-Five Theses, the entire life of the Christian is one of repentance, a turning away from self and turning toward God. This repentance is not the precondition for God’s gracious power at work in our lives but an expression of it. And so, when we keep Lent as a particularly intensified time of repentance and return to God, when we take on special practices of penitence, we do so not to earn divine favor but so that this time might be a means of God’s transforming work in our hearts. And even our failures in keeping our Lenten disciplines can become means of growth in Christ, of realizing anew our own utter incapacity to make ourselves holy and thus of letting God humble us and make room to work in us.

Lent is about repentance, a repentance not wrought by the triumphant human will but rather by God, who gives us the capacity for humility and surrender to him. May God indeed create new and contrite hearts this year in us, gently leading us by the loving discipline of Lent to turn anew to him.