Don’t care about who gives you the sacraments of the Church, said the bishop. Don’t demand a cleric of high status in the Church and in society, because you think an everyday cleric from an average family isn’t good enough for someone of your high status. 

Don’t reject a priest unless you think he’s holy enough, because you think you’ll be sullied by receiving the sacraments from an average sinner. And don’t disdain to worship with poorer people if you’re rich, with people from average backgrounds if you’re from “a good family,” or with your employees if you’re a boss. 

Would anyone really do that, you may ask. People apparently did. These instructions are rough paraphrases of St. Gregory of Nazianzus’ words in his “Oration of Holy Baptism,” given in the later fourth century in the last of his two years as the archbishop of Constantinople. (Apparently, two very frustrating years for a man so concerned for his people’s holiness.)

His instructions point to a helpful, but not much noticed, aspect of the season of Lent. On that day and through that season, we enact in a personal way our fundamental equality in the Church and learn something about our own sins and failings that should break down, at least a little, any ideas about ourselves that make us think we’re better than others.

Worldliness in the Church

It’s a lesson most of us need, I think, because we live in a world very like St. Gregory’s and their sins are our sins. We probably won’t make the particular distinctions he condemned, but we’ll make ourselves better than other Christians in other ways.

When the archbishop wrote, the Church had gotten comfortable in the world. The Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the religion of the empire less than a year before he preached his oration. This meant that people brought particular worldly values to their lives as Christians even more than they had before, because the world they now felt part of encouraged those values.

One of those was the importance of social and economic status and the conviction that the differences indicated differences in how valuable people are. People inevitably separate people into better and worse, higher and lower, worthy and unworthy, using whatever criteria give them an advantage.

The world in which Christians were beginning to live comfortably encouraged people not just to keep up with the Joneses, but to get ahead of the Joneses. Just like ours.

That had been true even at the beginning, of course. St. Paul mentions in his first letter to the Christians in Corinth (1 Corinthians 11:17ff) the wealthier members eating and drinking to excess and the poorer members going hungry. But I think the temptation grows stronger when Christians feel safe and secure in the world. As we are.

Don’t Be Worldly

St. Gregory knocked down the idea. Trust every minister for your purification, he says, as long as he’s in good standing and known to the Church. You need healing, and you should take it from anyone authorized to give it to you. 

“Do not judge your judges, you who need healing,” he says, “and do not make fine distinctions about the rank of those who shall cleanse you, or be critical about your spiritual fathers.” He says that making distinctions about rank indicates they’re not as serious about their salvation as they should be.

He illustrates his point with the image of two rings, one gold, the other iron, both with the same royal image on them. “When they impress the wax, what difference is there between the seal of the one and that of the other? None.” They make the same mark on the wax, and it’s the mark that matters. “And so anyone can be your baptizer. Though one may excel another in his life, yet the grace of baptism is the same, and anyone may be your consecrator who is formed in the same faith.”

What St. Gregory said about our particular relation to the clergy applies to our relation to everyone else. We do not need to make fine distinctions about anyone else’s status, or even rough distinctions, because the difference doesn’t matter for the way we should relate to them — except when we reflect on our own advantages and blessings and what we can do for others not so advantaged or blessed.

Lent Against the World

We can easily see that kind of snobbery and think it’s not a kind to which we’re tempted, but I think most of us are. We might not look down on the poor the way many of our ancestors did, as deserving whatever suffering they endure — but think about backwoods snake-handlers. Not feeling at least a little superior to them will be hard for many of us. Or smug small-town fundamentalist anti-Catholics with dumb arguments. 

Or or or. It would be easy to think of thousands of possible targets that we can believe ourselves justified in feeling superior to. We are amazingly ingenious in finding reasons to claim we’re better than others. 

A disturbingly high percentage of Christian social media posts come from people putting down other Christians. I find myself doing this with the excuse that I’m correcting a mistake or challenging an error, and I am, but I’m also enjoying being publicly right and my targets wrong, with the accompanying feeling that I’m characteristically right and they’re almost always wrong. I know I’m not alone in this.

Lent is the liturgical season that tells us over and over that we have no reason to do this, that in telling us “Judge not,” Jesus wasn’t saying only, “Be kind,” but “Just look at yourself.” Or perhaps, “You’re not one to talk.” He’s holding up a mirror between us and the person we want to judge.

The Reality About Ourselves

Lent starts out on Ash Wednesday with a dramatic liturgical statement that functions as a guiding theme for the season, the reality about ourselves that we will work for seven weeks to understand more deeply. The Church tells everyone shuffling forward in line, directly and individually, in the very same words, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.” (The alternative makes the same statement, but not as clearly.)

That line says many things, but one important thing it tells us is that we are each of us the same in our relation to the ultimate realities and thus that we have no right to look down on another sinner. The priest proclaims, implicitly, our fundamental equality in the Church.

You may be in line behind a homeless man and in front of a billionaire, but in the matter at hand, the three of you are absolutely, completely, and utterly equal. Whoever you think you are, and whoever they think they are, you’re all going to die and disappear, and probably be quickly forgotten. Whatever worldly status you had when you were alive, you won’t have it when you’re dead. God, as St. Paul notes, is no respecter of persons.

The lesson doesn’t stop being taught on Ash Wednesday. It’s not taught as a direct lesson, but learned as the effect of the disciplines we practice through the rest of the season. We learn more about our failings and sins and how deep they run and how hard we have to work to reduce them, and how weak and dependent upon God’s grace we are. 

The more we feel that, the less we should compare ourselves with others, and the less we should look for ways to elevate ourselves above them. Not so much that we will say to ourselves, “We’re all equal before God,” but that our conscience should grow quicker to say, “Who do you think you are?” when we start to judge someone else. We should feel that we have more work to do on ourselves before we can possibly think of trying to fix someone else. Everything we do, from reading more Scripture to giving more alms, should take a little air out of our over-inflated view of ourselves.

At least that’s been one of my experiences of Lent. I won’t claim to have made great progress, but I have learned to better appreciate how little reason I have to think as well of myself as I did, and do, and how hard the desire to claim superiority is to eradicate. My conscience is a little more alert to temptations to put down others. I know I’m not alone in this as well.

An understanding of Christian equality is one of the great gifts the Church gives us through Lent.