The First Week of Lent 2025
Last Advent, Five Books for Catholics recommended an apposite book for each week of the liturgical season. It will do likewise during Lent. Moreover, the book chosen for the First Week of Advent was a collection of St. Bernard’s sermons for Christmastide. Now that it is Lent, it makes sense to follow up on that recommendation and propose his Sermons for Lent and the Easter Season.
Sermons for Lent and the Easter Season
by St. Bernard of Clairvaux
This collection of Bernard’s sermons is a good guide not just for Lent, but also for Holy Week and Easter. Six of the sermons are for Lent, three for Palm Sunday, one for Wednesday of Holy Week, one on the Lord’s Supper, four on the Resurrection, and two for the Easter Octave.
As it is Lent, it makes sense to stick with his six sermons for this season.
Many have written sermons on Lent or books of spiritual advice for the season. Why settle on those of St. Bernard, a twelfth-century monk? After all, he is far removed in time and context from our world. Moreover, if we are unaccustomed to reading ancient and medieval Christian writings, we might find his preaching not just far removed from our situation but even rambling.
These are not sound objections. Nobody has serious doubts that Shakespeare is worth reading, even though, like Bernard, he wrote several centuries ago. So, there is no reason to write off Bernard simply because he is a twelfth-century author. Nor can we object that his sermons are boring when compared to Shakespeare’s plays. Unlike the Bard, Bernard is neither a poet nor a playwright. Rather, he is something greater than Shakespeare: a saint and doctor of the Church. That alone makes his Lenten sermons worth reading.
Nor was Bernard a poor writer. Quite the contrary. He is known as the mellifluous doctor (doctor melifluus) precisely because he is a brilliant stylist and speaker. Ewert H. Cousins has remarked how readers are likely to be “carried along by his passionate eloquence.” Much of his eloquence comes across even in the English translation. However, if you know Latin, he is well worth reading in the original. An economic edition with the Latin text of the sermons for Lent and Holy Week is available from Sources chrétiennes (no. 567).
Nevertheless, many modern readers may find Bernard uncongenial at first because we are unaccustomed to the genres in which he wrote. In this regard, some observations of an eminent scholar of the saint, Dom Jean Leclerq, are pertinent.
"Modern man is in a hurry; he likes to discover ideas quickly without much reading and even his prayer is hasty. The aim of the ancient and medieval spiritual authors was not to provide food for reflection; rather, they sought to encourage an experience through recollections of a poetical nature. They gave free rein to their imagination in a way that, to us, seems more like fantasy than thought. They wrote playfully of symbols and were given to variations on biblical themes that appear more rhapsodic than strictly theological. The medieval style often seems obscure but is, in fact, mysterious. The deliberate lack of clarity hides inexhaustible treasures. Each reading of St. Bernard brings to light unsuspected riches."
If you still find St. Bernard’s Lenten sermons dry or rambling, you can still get a lot out of his Lenten sermons. Focus not on the argument he unfolds but on his many brilliant apothegms. Here are a couple.
“Unhappy the person who spends all his time with things outside, ignorant of his own inner self; he thinks himself to be something when he is nothing; he deceives himself.” Sermon 2
“Weakness of conscience is produced by weakness in endurance.”
Sermon 3
“Christ has to live in a person who does not live in himself.”
Sermon 6
Knowing how to read Bernard is important, but more important still is to pick up on his actual teaching. As Leclerq noted, Bernard sometimes writes with a “deliberate lack of clarity.” For example, he does not always spell out the thematic unity that underlies a set of sermons. Rather, he expects that the reader or listener to pick it up by meditating attentively or repeatedly on what he says. This is true of his sermons for Lent. Here then are some pointers for reading them.
First, St. Bernard urges us to view Lent under the optic of the militia Christi or spiritual combat. It is easy to surmise why he does so. During Lent we follow Christ into the desert, where he fasted for forty days and battled with the enemy. Hence, Bernard opens the first sermon with a call to Christian warfare. “Today, beloved, we enter the holy season of Lent, a season of Christian warfare.” Similarly, he closes the final sermon with an exhortation to “take up spiritual arms” and to intensify our spiritual combat during Lent, “so that a great victory may result, for the glory of our King.” He urges us to “to use this holy season with all devotion…to repair our spiritual armour.”
Throughout these sermons, therefore, Bernard stresses the various dimensions of the Christian’s spiritual warfare. On the one hand, the Christian must combat his own sinfulness and reluctance to do penance or practice ascetism. In many ways, we are our own worst enemy because we “make our own snare” and carry it around within ourselves. On the other hand, the Christian must combat the incessant and insidious onslaught of malign spirits. In other words, the Christian wages a spiritual war on two fronts: against the flesh and against the devil. Bernard brings this dual dimension of spiritual combat into focus in Sermon 5.
Naturally, St. Bernard urges us to perform the exterior works of penance during Lent. The opening sermon is on fasting. However, his exhortation to ascetism is shot through with mysticism. The motives which he adduces for fasting regard our sacramental union with Christ. He states this explicitly at the beginning of Sermon 3. Yes, you should “undertake the Lenten fast with complete devotion.” However, “abstinence alone does not commend it to you, but, much more, the mystery.”
“What kind of person—–I don’t say monk, but Christian—undertakes with small devotion this fast that Christ himself gave to us? No, we must imitate the example of Christ’s fast with much greater devotion because surely he fasted for our sake, not his own.”
Sermon 3
Furthermore, Bernard argues that “Lent does not just have forty days,” but that “(w)e must continue this Lent all the days of this miserable life.” His point is that Lent is a concrete expression not just of penance, but also of the ascetism that is required to live faithfully the Gospel and the Decalogue. The practice of penance and ascetism cannot be confined to the forty days that precede Easter. In this sense, Lent should continue throughout our life. This might seem an overly dour view of the Christian life. However, Bernard can and does apply the same logic the Easter mystery. Throughout this life we already share in Christ’s triumph and its joy.
Bernard invites us to construe not only Lent more broadly and deeply but also fasting, the Lenten discipline he dwells upon most throughout the sermons.
Properly speaking, fasting is the penitential and ascetic abstinence from food. However, it can also be construed more broadly as the ascetic disciplining and curbing of any power or exterior act. Bernard bids us to look upon fasting in this way and, upon examining our conscience, to discipline those powers by which we are wont to sin.
“If only the belly has sinned, let it alone fast, and that will be enough; but if other members have also sinned, why should they not fast as well? Let the eye fast, since it has ravaged the soul. Let the ear fast, the tongue, the hand, even the soul itself. Let the eye fast from curious glances and from all wantonness, that when well-humbled it may be brought to repentance, the eye that while free wandered wickedly into sin. Let the ear fast that itches for tales and rumours and whatever is idle and of no use for salvation. Let the tongue fast from slander and grumbling, from fruitless, vain, and scurrilous words, and sometimes, too, because of the importance of silence, even from the very things that seem necessary. Let the hand fast from making useless signs and from all work not explicitly commanded. But also, and much more, let the soul itself fast from vices and from its own will. Without this kind of fast all the rest is disagreeable to the Lord.”
Bernard’s counsel to abstain “even from the very things that seem necessary,” on account of “the importance of silence,” is particularly timely in the electronic age.
Whereas fasting is the predominant theme in the first three sermons, in the next two he shifts his attention to another of the three exterior works of penance: prayer. In so doing, he is not skipping to a different subject but exploring a further aspect of fasting. Fruitful fasting is inextricable from prayer. It both supposes and supports prayer.
“See how intimately fasting and prayer are joined, for it is written, Brother helps brother, and both shall be comforted (Proverbs 18:19). Prayer demands the virtue of fasting, and fasting earns the grace of prayer. Fasting strengthens prayer; prayer sanctifies fasting and offers it to the Lord. What profit do we get from fasting if it remains on earth—which God forbid! Let us lift up fasting, then, on the wing of prayer.”
However, it is not enough to simply pray. The quality of our prayer matters just as much. Bernard warns that our prayer can fall short in three ways. It may be either too timid, too rash, or simply lukewarm. Salutary prayer is filled with confidence, humility, and fervour.
Bernard’s exhorts us therefore to intensify our fasting and prayer during Lent. These are indispensable means of spiritual warfare. That warfare is itself a means. As Bernard highlights in the closing sermon, we are pilgrims journeying toward our heavenly homeland. We must keep our mind and heart fastened on our destination and be careful not to get caught up in what is going on at the wayside.
May the careful and meditative reading of St. Bernard’s sermons for Lent stir us to live the penitential season more intensely out of love for Christ our Saviour.
