Monday: Week 1 in Lent Year B

Lent for Everyone
Mark Year B
WEEK 1: MONDAY...

...I am writing this not long after the worldwide commemorations that took place on the tenth anniversary of the terrible terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. In many countries around the globe, people stopped what they were doing and paused to remember, and shudder. Many wept. There were church services, solemn music, the reading out of names.

Some great and terrible events are felt to be so important that only a pause, only a solemn commemoration, will do. It seems to be quite wrong that you should have a party or a dance, or indeed a wedding, at such a time. Can you imagine the effect if, as the commemorations in New York were at their height, a clown and a juggler had burst out of the crowd and started to perform funny, silly antics to make the crowds laugh? People would have been shocked. The police would probably have come and hustled the troublemakers away.

Nobody knows how long America will go on commemorating that horrible day. But the Jewish people of Jesus’ day had been commemorating other disasters, as great as those of September 11 and much greater, for centuries...

Taken from Lent for Everyone Mark Year B by Tom Wright