In the church’s calendar, Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of a season; the season of Lent. A season that calls us to face up to the truth about our sin in the eyes of God.

Of course, in setting aside a season like this, it was never the intention to suggest that this practice (dare we even say “discipline”?) was just a one-month-in-a-year affair. A month of relative gloom and abstinence and introspection and no meat on Fridays – all sackcloth and ashes – before we could get on again with our usual habits of self-indulgence for the other 11 months of the year. Growing up in a church tradition that made more of a thing of Lent than we do here, that’s how it often felt to me.

In the church’s liturgical tradition, the practice of self-examination and confession has never been isolated to the weeks of Lent. If you went to church twice a day, each day of the week, as folk once did, and heard each day the daily “offices” – morning, evening prayer, holy communion – every service would begin with a call to self-examination and repentance. Not for a matter of weeks, but each and every service, every single day.

What the annual season of Lent marked, then, was not a rather traumatic, isolated and – thank the Lord – relatively disproportionate part of Christian experience and discipleship, but something that is a normal daily rhythm.

For if our lives can be mapped out in a succession of years, with seasons of beginnings and endings, of seed time, growth and harvest, so our years capture what is also mapped out in miniature each day, with its beginnings and endings: a daily succession of dawn, noon and dusk.

That was always the point of the church’s liturgical calendar: to superimpose our daily spiritual journey as Christ’s disciples onto our years – at least as they unfolded in the Northern Hemisphere! Dawning hope in seasons of decline (Advent); light and joy in seasons of darkness (Christmas); humility and lament in seasons of growth (Lent); as well as joy and thanksgiving in seasons of plenty – stretching out, over an entire year, what is the normal, daily pattern of discipleship.

Every day contains, in a sense, not one season but all of them: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, as well as ordinary times of thanksgiving. Perhaps in different proportions depending on what each day presents, but all of them nonetheless.

An aversion to lament

Yet when it comes to lament, we evangelicals have sometimes had an awkward conscience. Aside from our general aversion to all things liturgical, not least religious festivals and seasons (with the exception, perhaps, of Christmas and Easter), we can be particularly touchy when it comes to Lent.

Why all the chest-beating and gloom, why all the sackcloth and ashes, if it’s really true that we’ve been forgiven once for all in Christ? Where is the freedom and joy and assurance of our complete pardon in Christ?

Why a day, a month, of fasting, when – thanks to Jesus – I can tuck into my pork sausage with a clear conscience, as the Reformer Zwingli encouraged his parishioners to do during the month of Lent?

If we’re touchy about the mood of Lent for just one month of the year, it’s no surprise that the daily practice of lament and confession is often airbrushed out of our corporate gatherings, almost as a matter of principle. It’s as if, as I’ve sometimes heard it said, such practices might undermine the very assurance of the gospel. Thanksgiving and rejoicing for what Christ has done to forgive us? By all means. But regular confession and absolution? No.

Forgiven and restored

What strikes me about Psalm 32, though, is that King David begins with profound thanks for forgiveness: 

Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the one whose sin the LORD does not count against them...

There is thanksgiving and rejoicing in the tremendous blessing of forgiveness – absolutely. And yet, as the psalm continues, this experience of blessing and joy is entered into not apart from, but only through, the practice of confession.

On this occasion we don’t know what his sin was, although we know for sure that David was a sinner like the rest of us. But whatever it was, he says in verse 3 that when he kept silent about it, “my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long”.

We hear that and we think, oh, he’s done something wrong – perhaps seriously wrong – and his conscience is troubled about it. Fair enough.

But then he continues with something that may be a little surprising to us. It wasn’t just a troubled conscience, he says, “For day and night your hand was heavy on me”, as if to say this isn’t just a guilty conscience: there’s a broken relationship.

In other words, it’s not just that my troubled conscience needs to be reminded of the gospel right now – that Jesus has died and washed away all my sin, and then all the pangs of guilt will magically disappear. No, he goes on, “I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD’.” 

Then, and only then, “you forgave the guilt of my sin.”

But hasn’t my sin already been forgiven, you ask? Hasn’t the guilt already been washed away by the blood of Jesus?

Well, yes, like David, you are no longer a slave, no longer an alien, no longer without hope and without God in the world (as Paul puts it in Ephesians 2:12): you are a ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven child of God. Absolutely yes. 

And yet, like any parent will tell you, when their children sin – and sin they do, sometimes very seriously indeed – the status of the relationship may not be affected, but the intimacy, the warmth, the fellowship, the joy of that relationship most certainly is.

Until the sin is uncovered, named, acknowledged, confessed; until the truth of it is faced up to for what it really is, a cloud remains.

And as David knows, it’s no less true of our relationship with God.

But here’s the thing: far from being a disincentive to repentance and confession, it’s the very status and security of that relationship that enables us to face up to the truth about our sin.

What is it that finally brought David to his knees in repentance? It wasn’t because God dragged it out of him. It wasn’t even a sense of shame or embarrassment, although he might have felt those things. And it certainly wasn’t fear of the consequences. All those things are, in fact, the enemy of true repentance and confession. After all, Jesus says, everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear their deeds will be exposed (John 3:20).

No, David falls to his knees because, in verse 7, he’s remembered something about God: “You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance”. 

What an extraordinary thing to say! If you are my hiding place, O Lord, what indeed is there to hide?

There is no good reason, then, for lament and confession to be a fitful and traumatic affair, something confined to a particularly morose season of penitence, or else airbrushed out of our discipleship altogether. Far from being the enemy of an intimate and secure relationship with God, it’s the complete reverse. 

Each and every day, our heavenly Father is inviting us to enter into the true freedom, the joy, the blessed assurance of our adoption as his ransomed children. No longer hiding, as Adam and Eve once did in the garden, but facing up to the truth about our sin, he invites us to pray as David did in Psalm 139:23-24, “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting”.

The Rev Dr Andrew Leslie is head of Theology, Philosophy and Ethics, and teaches Christian Doctrine at Moore College.