Sunday: Week 4 in Lent Year B

Lent for Everyone
Mark Year B
WEEK 4 SUNDAY...

...Please read the whole Psalm. I know: it’s Sunday, you’re busy, nine verses is easier than forty-three. But please read it anyway. We live in an age of snippets: the British radio station Classic FM has got big, these last ten years, by playing one movement of this quartet, one segment of this oratorio, one passage from that suite or symphony. Several of the great composers must be permanently turning in their graves: how can you understand the last movement of Sibelius’s fifth symphony if you haven’t lived through the first two? It’s as though you went for a mountain walk and someone gave you a ride most of the way in a helicopter, so that you could simply stride the last half mile to the summit without doing all the work along the way, without coming to terms with the mountain’s particular ridges and streams. Anyway, please read the whole Psalm.

When you do, you’ll feel, as well as see, the obvious pattern. Things are going badly wrong: wandering in the desert, prisoners in darkness, sick and dying, tossed about on the wild ocean. It comes again and again. ‘Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he saved them from their distress . . .

Taken from Lent for Everyone Mark Year B by Tom Wright