Lent

Pastor’s Epistle—March, A.D. 2017 A

Once Upon a Time, the early Church celebrated two holidays: Sunday and Holy Week.

Later festivals popped up commemorating the deaths of martyrs or the consecrations of important church buildings. But most of the big ones—Christmas, St John’s Day, the Annunciation—fall when they do because they were calculated, however torturously, from the reference point of Holy Week. Holy Week is, as they say, Sunday for the year.

As the Church grew, it became customary for prospective members to go through a period of learning and discernment. These students were known as Catechumens. They would receive religious instruction in theology and the Christian life, while engaging in disciplines of prayer and service to the poor. Catechumens would attend Sunday worship, but stayed only for the first part of the service: the reading of the Scriptures, the sermon, and the prayers. They would be dismissed before the celebration of Communion.

When Holy Week drew near, the Catechumens would prepare themselves through fasting, almsgiving, and confession. On the night of the Easter Vigil, they would be baptized into the Body of Christ, so that on Easter morning they could receive the Holy Eucharist, the Body and Blood of our Lord, for the first time.

That’s what Lent is all about. It’s the season of the Church year in which people prepare themselves for the Sacraments of Baptism and Communion. And it has long been traditional for the Church as a whole to join in fasting, almsgiving and repentance so as to kneel in solidarity with those preparing to be baptized at the Easter Vigil. The Catechumenate does not walk alone; all of God’s Church walks with them towards the Cross and empty tomb. We fast because they are fasting.

Lent lasts 40 days (not counting Sundays) because 40 is a highly symbolic number in the Bible. Think of the 40 days and nights of Noah’s Flood, or of Jesus’ 40-day Temptation in the Wilderness. Ancient peoples knew that it takes roughly 40 weeks for a pregnant woman to come to term and bear a child, and so the number 40 always represents periods of difficulty and trial—indeed, of pain and sorrow—leading to new life and new birth. We would do well to remember this whenever we come across the number 40 in the Scriptures.

This March we stride headlong into Lent, fasting and giving, confessing and praying. It is a time of preparation, of solidarity, and of repentance. But it is also a season of expectant hope, knowing full well that Jesus walks before us into the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and that all the horrors of the Cross will be transformed to shouts of joy on that glorious Easter dawn just over the horizon. We drown in our sins to rise again in Christ.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.