Blessed Lord,
you have taught us that without love
our deeds are worth nothing;
send your Holy Spirit,
and pour into our hearts that most perfect gift of love,
the true bond of peace and of all virtues,
for without love we are reckoned as dead before you.
Grant this for the sake of your Son,
Jesus Christ our Saviour.
Amen
Quinquagesima (from the Latin for 50th) marks 50 days before Easter, and is the Sunday before Lent. With that in mind, the question arises, ‘How do we approach a season of self-discipline and preparation for Easter?” The original Roman Catholic collect on which this is based presumed it would require a ‘Sacrament of Penance’ — an approach rejected by the Reformers. Instead, this collect calls us to pray for God’s indwelling love.
As in other collects, the prayer establishes a biblical truth or promise from God as a basis for our prayer. This collect, reworking 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, underlines that mere religious activity is meaningless without the transformation of the heart. If love, for God and others, is not motivating our actions there is no spiritual benefit. Yet our capacity to love is not self-generated, it is a gift of God through the work of the Holy Spirit.
So the prayer/petition itself, alluding to Ephesians 3:14-4:6, prays for the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love, which in Ephesians 3:14-19 will in turn lead us to contemplate Christ through faith. That is the truest preparation for celebrating the death and resurrection of our Saviour. But that is also the foundation of our fellowship together, as the Ephesians 3 prayer for indwelling love is followed by a call to live a life worthy of his presence (4:1), that leads us to “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (4:3).
The fruitfulness of our Christian life depends on the indwelling work of the Holy Spirit, not the fervency of our self-discipline or religious activity. Indeed, alluding to James 2:14-26 where “faith without deeds is dead”, a faith without that Spirit-given love underlying our deeds is just as spiritually dead, not least because it is God’s love/grace that takes the initiative to save us in Christ (Ephesians 2:1-10). That is why the final petition takes us back to Jesus’ saving work as the foundation for the prayer itself — “for the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ our Saviour.”
This Scripture-saturated prayer is a vital reminder that the gospel both saves and sanctifies us. God’s gift of himself to us in his saving death is applied to us by his indwelling Spirit, who is love and whose fruit is love. The motivation for our Christian discipleship is not just our obedience to lists of ‘thou shalt not’s or ‘oughtism’ — expectations of what you ought to do; but rather, the presence of God’s Spirit transforms our motivation to love both God’s will and people in a way that underlies every expression of true faith. It is the Spirit’s transformation of our hearts that leads to the transformation of our lives in relation to God and each other — and that is a prayer not just for Lent, but for all our Christian life!
So pray this with me:
Blessed Lord,
you have taught us that without love
our deeds are worth nothing;
send your Holy Spirit,
and pour into our hearts that most perfect gift of love,
the true bond of peace and of all virtues,
for without love we are reckoned as dead before you.
Grant this for the sake of your Son,
Jesus Christ our Saviour.
Amen