"Put on the Garments of Christ": Cyril of Jerusalem and the Origins of Lent

by Carl Sommer | Homiletic & Pastoral Review

If Cyril of Jerusalem were among us today, he might merely challenge us to take our Lenten devotions a little deeper.

In the Spring of 347, Cyril of Jerusalem delivered a series of teachings to the catechumens of Jerusalem.  In the introduction to these lectures, Cyril told his auditors, "This charge I give you, before Jesus the Bridegroom of souls come in….A long notice is allowed you; you have forty days for repentance…" 1  Seated in the magnificent, newly completed Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Cyril delivered an impassioned plea for genuine repentance, conversion, and the acceptance of an entirely new way of life.  "Even Simon Magus once came to the Laver:  he was baptized, but was not enlightened; and though he dipped his body in water, he enlightened not his heart with the Spirit: his body went down and came up, but his soul was not buried with Christ, nor raised with Him" 2, Cyril warned the catechumens.

It must have been a powerful moment for Cyril's hearers.  Seated in the very place where Christ spent three days in the tomb, then rose from the dead, Cyril's powerful rhetoric must have touched them to the core.  And, indeed, his words still have the same power to this very day, for in reading them anew, I am reminded how feeble my own Lenten preparations are, and am stirred to genuine conversion.

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