'Through the grave, and gate of death': Penitence and the Prayer Book

This series of short Lenten reflections on penitence in the Prayer Book concludes with a prayer from the Burial of the Dead in the Church of Ireland Book of Common Prayer 1926. Fittingly for these days of late Lent, the prayer is the collect for Easter Even, placed alongside a prayer for the bereaved after the reading from Scripture. It ensures that as we gather at the grave and confront our mortality, we hear the call to penitence.

Grant, O Lord, that as we are baptized into the death of thy blessed Son our Saviour Jesus Christ ...

In the Passion of the Lord, death has been swallowed up in victory. In the words of the Apostle: "For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection". In the face of death we are recalled to our baptism, the sign of our participation in the death and resurrection of Christ: living out this gift, in penitence and faith, we are conformed to the Lord's death that we might share His Resurrection.

so by continual mortifying our corrupt affections we may be buried with him ...

The way that leads to Resurrection necessarily entails dying to the ways of death, for "they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God". Our life-long penitence, therefore, is an entry into the Lord's Tomb, the ground of Resurrection: "Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord". In the words of Jeremy Taylor, "If we should spend all our years of reason so as such a person would spend that one, can it be thought that life would be short and trifling in which he had performed such a religion, served God with so much holiness, mortified sin with so great a labour, purchased virtue at such a rate and so rare an industry? It must needs be that such a man must die when he ought to die, and be like ripe and pleasant fruit falling from a fair tree, and gathered into baskets for the planter's use".

and that through the grave, and gate of death, we may pass to our joyful resurrection ...

Penitence is the path of Resurrection, of the life everlasting. Not, of course, that penitence has any merit of its own: it does not. But penitence is our life-long conversion to Resurrection, an authentic turning in heart, mind, and soul to the fullness of life in the Resurrection of Christ. Without such penitence, we do not enter into the Lord's Tomb, we are not standing on the ground of Resurrection: we remain clogged in the ways of death. Walking the way of penitence we abide in Lord's Tomb, thus preparing all the days of life to "pass to our joyful resurrection". 

for his merits, who died, and was buried, and rose again for us, thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

It is to this that penitence brings us: the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. And it is here we have, as Taylor puts it, "confidence of pardon and acceptation through the mercies of God and the merits of Jesus". To hear this call to penitence at the graveside, therefore, is itself a form of Lent, knowing that the gift of penitence - a passing through the Lord's Tomb - is the way to life everlasting.