On the final Sundays of the Trinity Season, the Church has traditionally looked at the coming new liturgical year as an annual time of repentance; and hence the theme of our Collect:
O Lord, we beseech thee, absolve thy people from their offences: that through thy bountiful goodness we may all be delivered from the bands of those sins, which by our frailty we have committed. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ‘s sake, our blessed Lord and Saviour: who liveth and reigneth with thee, and the Holy Ghost ever, one God, world without end. Amen.
As the year closes, we are conscious of the things we have done, and those left undone. Sins bind us, as our prayer says, and though it is our will, rather than our frailty, which is the cause of our sins, it is our frailty which leaves us open to temptation, and if we succumb, we become imprisoned.
Each sin is like another brick in the wall of our separation from God, and another link in the chain of our bondage to our own passions. A kind of compulsion springs from the frailty of our being apart from Christ, and that compulsion becomes a prison to us. For release to be accomplished, sin must be dealt with with God’s forgiveness. Thus our prayer asks God to do the one thing sufficient to break our bondage “Lord, we beseech thee, absolve thy people from their offenses.”
Absolution is the breaking of the chains of our sins and offenses. Our bondage is both spiritual and physical. The physical evils to which we are susceptible are the result of sin. Not by a direct cause and effect relationship, but the disease and decay and death to which our physical bodies succumb are the manifestation in the physical realm of what sin does to our souls; this frailty to which absolution is the blow that breaks the cycle.
Our sins become a part of ourselves, as passions, and the Cross of Christ stands as that resistance to sin which God requires in us, but which we cannot attain except by His grace.
We don’t often look at sin this way, and yet, our sanctification, our growth in holiness is above all, the production in us, by the Holy Spirit, of a proper attitude towards sin, a realization of our unconsciousness of God. All our forgetfulness not only adds to the chain of our bondage, but it also blunts our capacity for seeing sin in its true light and hating it as we ought, which is the proper use of the aggressive, incensive, or irascible faculty of our soul.
Our penitence must include absolute antagonism to sin. God, through the work of His Spirit in our hearts, begins the breaking down of our frailty, by first giving the death-blow to our bondage when we cry out in our yet imperfect repentance and penitence, and then, by supplying us with the grace, if we will avail ourselves of it, to build up the new creature in the Spirit of Christ and the power of His resurrection.
This is the root of the structure of all our services in our common liturgical life in the Church. Before the Divine Liturgy, we prepare by confessing and asking His forgiveness, and then that His Holy Spirit would cleanse the thoughts of our hearts that we may perfectly love Him and worthily magnify His holy Name.
“Lord, have mercy” is the recurring theme of our worship. After hearing His Word and proclaiming our belief in Him and His saving work wrought in Christ, we offer Him the symbols of our life: the sacrifice of our money and our oblations of bread & wine.
We pray for His Church, and again ask His forgiveness and only then do we make present once again His Sacrifice for us, the means of our absolution, and receive from Him the food and drink of eternal life, which nourishes the new creature and unites us to Him and all the benefits of His Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension and the bestowing of His Spirit.
Our life in the Church, as the Body of Christ is our true life. Not simply a momentary recalling of the Cross, but allowing the Cross to define the very essence of our being, who we are and what we are about in this world.
True worship demands that our work and everyday life be offered to God and integrated into the divine order of things, but we who come to offer have sinned. Sin has cut us off from the divine life, our true life, and the way back is the way of the Cross.
Worship demands a point of integration, where the Cross is brought back as an ever-present reality; all so that we can lay down at the Cross our own sins and the sins of the whole world.
This is where our work and life, however imperfect, are given purpose and direction by being joined to and made one with Christ’s perfect offering; where man can see a vision of that adoration which all life should be. This point of integration is found in the Eucharistic Sacrifice, the center on which the whole liturgy converges, giving our life its true meaning, and transforming the whole of creation into a means of communion with our Father Who made it by His Spirit through His Word.
We come wounded and ailing to touch the hem of His garment, to kneel at the Cross, to receive the absolution offered there. And we depart, cleansed and whole and fit for His service once again. This is the cycle of our services, the cycle of our Christian year, and the cycle of our lives.
As we approach the new year with Advent, it is time to take stock once more of where we are in relation to the Cross. Our only proper spiritual position is prostrate at its feet, beseeching God for the absolution of our sins and freedom from their bonds, and to be strengthened by His Spirit in our frailty.