The Ark of Salvation
There is an aspect of Shrovetide that remains hidden to the faithful who do not recite the Church’s Divine Office. While the daily readings at Matins during Epiphanytide were focused on the Epistles of St. Paul, the Church has now shifted her attention to the very beginning of Holy Scripture, the book of Genesis. The reason for this transition is clear—as we approach the season of Lent and duly prepare our penances, we need to be reminded why we should do penance. As we make our way through Lent towards Calvary, our dread increases at the terrible sufferings endured by our Lord and Saviour. Surely, our penances are geared towards making reparation for all he went through on our behalf. But of course, there is more to this story than just the Crucifixion. There is the question of why there had to be a Crucifixion in the first place.
God did not send his beloved Son to this earth so that he could suffer for no particular reason. There was a very specific motive for our Lord’s Passion and Death, and that motive springs from the events of the first few chapters of Genesis. Adam and Eve’s original sin separated all mankind from their salvation, blackening their treacherous souls and those of their offspring until such time as a sufficient sacrifice could be made by man to make up for his betrayal of God’s love. That original sin was no less than “Paradise Lost.” For thousands of years after his expulsion from the Garden of Eden, man sinned his way through life, continuing his rebellion against his Father in heaven. From Cain, who murdered his brother Abel, to the Roman Empire, the greater portion of mankind was reduced to a wretched life of sin, while only a few strove to remain righteous.
On this second Sunday of Shrovetide, our readings at Matins tell the story of Noah. At a time when the world had descended into moral chaos, God chose to destroy the entire human race with a Great Flood. However, out of the mass of lost souls, he also chose to save one man and his family. He instructed Noah to construct a huge vessel that would carry them and specimens of each species of animal in safety through the approaching storm. Noah’s Ark remained afloat for forty days and forty nights as the rising waters drowned all other life on earth. It was truly the Ark of Salvation for Noah and his family, who now represented a new beginning for the great family of mankind. It was a symbol, a foreshadowing of our blessed Lord himself, who would eventually carry the family of man to an even greater Salvation, not of our body but of our eternal soul.
Just as the Ark of Noah rose above the flooded material world for forty days and nights, so did our Lord show us that the way of rising above our own material desires and attachments was by fasting, and this he also did for forty days in the wilderness. He is the example we must follow during the coming season of Lent, a period of forty days and nights also. As Ash Wednesday approaches, we must abandon the routines of our bodily needs and appetites, refocusing them on the Old Testament series of events that led to the coming of our Savior: the sin of Adam and fall of man, the promise made to him of a Savior who would redeem him and his offspring, the continuing treachery of this offspring and the bodily salvation represented by Noah’s Ark, God’s loving guide to a moral lifestyle provided in the Ten Commandments after Moses had fasted for forty days, the protection of God’s chosen people as he led them out of their slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land, the ceaseless promises and warnings given to man through God’s prophets.
Think of all these events, apply them to our own lives and lifestyle, to our apathetic response to all these great events of the past, to our lukewarm love of God and the woeful inadequacy of our efforts to be perfect. Then let’s turn our attention to the New Testament, to our Lord’s suffering for forty days in the desert, suffering meant to guide us away from our attachments to this material world and the sins we commit here. And if our Lord’s forty-day fast fails to move us, let’s think of his last few hours, with all the pain and suffering he endured, so that we can’t resist any longer the need to make reparation, so that we can happily set aside our own pleasures and comforts, and most importantly, so that we can resist temptation and keep our souls clean and worthy of God’s grace.
The time for compromise is past. We can no longer pretend that we can have our cake and eat it. Let’s use this time of carnival, of Mardi Gras, to finish up that cake once and for all, so we may start Lent with the vigor, enthusiasm, generosity, and love of God that we must have in order to be admitted to that Ark of Salvation that will take us home.