This is the season of Lent, however you observe it, the time of anticipation and preparation for the horror of Good Friday and the resurrection joy of Easter. The Apostles’ Creed says that Jesus was crucified by a particular governor who ruled at a particular time, and so the Church has always marked time around Christ. It’s funny, Christians used to argue over when to observe the feast, not whether to observe it at all. If our Christian faith means anything in this world, it has to mean something about how we think about calendar and generally the Church’s drift is to not think about it. For those who do think about it, one temptation is to think of it as a reenactment which in one sense is unhelpful. If you reenact the sorrow of the apostles at the crucifixion of Jesus, you’ll be reenacting their unbelief and sinful despair, which is just something else to repent of.  More on the whole season of Lent later. For now, John Westerhoff and William Willimon have great insight on how to think of the liturgical calendar:

We must be clear that we are not engaging, in our liturgical year, in a cyclic redoing of historical events in the life of Christ which are remembered in a merely historical way. Our Church year celebrates the present reality of these events for us today. As we stated in the discussion of the Eucharist, the “remembrance” (anamnesis) of Christians is not historical recollection; rather it is remembering in the sense of remembering who we are. The Church year gives us our identity in the present, not just our memory of the past. … [Is] our worship an honest, painfully contemporary attempt to proclaim and enact the Gospel in light of what we understand to be God’s past and present dealings with us as well as God’s future purposes for us? (Liturgy Through the Life Cycle, 55)