What does Lent mean?

Lent comes from Old English lengthen or lencthen, a word that indicates the lengthening of daylight hours as we move toward Spring in the northern hemisphere. Thus, we find the weeks of Lent emerging around the vernal or spring equinox, right between the winter and summer solstices. At the spring equinox (mid-March), there are almost equal hours of light and darkness. It should not surprise us, then, that the northern hemisphere experiences a transformation, a conversion, in the land and the skies at this time of the year. Derived from its original name, Mars, the ancient god of war, March is marked by the struggle between light and darkness, by winter’s retreat and the promise of summer’s warmth and flourishing.

The Spring transformation of the land – from cold and barren to moist and fertile – and the transformation of the skies — from darkness to increasing light and warmth — was not lost on our ancient Jewish ancestors. By the time of the birth of Jesus, Jews throughout the ancient Mediterranean world celebrated the ancient Passover out of the “night” of Egyptian slavery into the “light” of God’s own freedom at the spring equinox. Why? The emergence of Spring expressed their own deep memory that as God acted in the past — offering deliverance from oppression, diminishment, and death — so could will continue to act in the present and the future.

When does Lent begin and end?

Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, February 17. On that day we are marked with a double sign, an ashen cross on our foreheads: double because it speaks the truth of our mortality — we are creatures made of the earth. It also speaks the truth of God’s remarkable mercy for us, revealed in Christ who poured out his life in love on the cross and raises us to life with him, now and in the future. The season ends as the sun sets on April 1, Maundy Thursday. Thus, Palm/Passion Sunday, March 28, is part of the Lenten season. The Three Days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy or Great Saturday (sometimes referred to in the Latin as the “Triduum,” meaning “three days”) mark our passage with Christ into a different way of experiencing and understanding life in this world, a way of living marked by virtues not necessarily alive in the larger culture.

Why did Lent come into existence?

The earliest Christian celebration was Sunday: the day of the Christ’s resurrection from the dead. Indeed, every Sunday, including every Sunday in Lent, is a celebration of Christ’s risen presence in creation, the church, and the Christian. Thus, there is to be no fasting on Sundays in Lent. The second major festival to emerge among Christians was an annual celebration of Christ’s resurrection from the dead close to the time of Passover (on the first Sunday, after the first full moon, after the vernal or spring equinox). The ancient Christian term for that day was Pascha, the Greek translation of the Hebrew pesach, or passover. Not long after Christians began to keep an annual feast of the Lord’s resurrection in the Spring, they began to celebrate — in Jerusalem — his death and then his last supper. A supper, a betrayal, a trial, his death by crucifixion, and his resurrection into the life of God became the nucleus of the earliest and central Christian celebration: the Three Days.

In his letter to the Christians at Rome, St. Paul speaks of baptism as a dying and a continual rising with Christ into “newness of life” (Romans 6:1-11). Early Christians recognized the relationship between celebrating the death and resurrection of Christ at Pascha and the celebration of baptism, of welcoming people into the “body of Christ,” his visible and public presence in the world. Thus, the weeks of Lent emerged as a time to prepare those who would be baptized and communed at the Easter Vigil on Great Saturday. Lent also became the time for the already baptized to reflect on their faithfulness to the baptismal covenant. Since some would be baptized at Easter and the baptized would renew their baptismal promises, Lent emerged as a time set aside for baptismal preparation. While some contemporary Christians may experience Lent as six weeks focused on the death of Jesus and the forgiveness of personal sin (that viewpoint emerged in the Middle Ages and continues among some Christian communions today), the six weeks of Lent first emerged, quite simply, as a time to prepare for baptism and baptismal renewal.

A baptismal retreat

Lent is intended to be our retreat as we prepare to renew our baptismal identity at Easter. Lent is the time when we help our brothers and sisters prepare to be marked in baptism as public servants of Jesus Christ and his central message: the coming of God’s reign of “justice, peace, and joy in the Spirit” (Romans 14:17). Thus, the biblical readings and preaching, the hymns and prayers, the colors and simplicity of the worship space for each Sunday and weekday Mass in Lent serve a form of spiritual direction. They have been carefully selected to help us come to the font of living and life-giving water in which we are born as Christ’s colorful, diverse, ordinary, struggling, doubtful, steadfast, odd, singing, joyful, questioning, trusting, loving sisters and brothers.

We have forty days as did Noah in the ark, Elijah at Mount Horeb, Jesus in the wilderness, and the disciples with the risen Christ — a forty day retreat to keep silence and to find, however briefly, a place of solitude in which we can ask ourselves:

+ How might I more intentionally participate in this community of faith: in its fellowship, teaching, prayers, and breaking of the bread?

+ Is there anything which makes me grow slack in resisting evil and prevents me from seeking God’s strength, forgiveness, and mercy?

+ When I encounter others (spouse, partner, children, parents, co-workers, strangers, people on the street), do I seek and serve Christ in them?

+ How might I strive more clearly for justice and peace — at work, in the city, the nation, and the world?

+ What might prevent me from respecting the dignity of every human being?

We are asked these questions during the baptismal liturgy. They are questions, or better yet, intuitions about what a Christian life looks like: rooted and strengthened in worship, study, and service; aware of the need to resist the power of evil in human life; shaped by the life of Christ who came to serve, not to be served; committed to the advance of God’s justice and peace on earth; respectful of those who share our faith, other faiths, or no faith at all.

A journey together

If medieval Christians experienced Lent as a time to reflect on the death of Jesus and the forgiveness of personal sin, early Christians experienced the Forty Days as a communal journey of renewal toward the Holy Washing and the Holy Meal — those actions in which Christians are born anew in the font and nourished with food and drink for courageous living in the world. Perhaps Forty Days are insufficient in length to think about and answer the challenging questions which push Christians from the sacred liturgy into the liturgy of living in the world. Perhaps it is good, then, that we have more than one Lent to return, again and again, to the mercy of God which surrounds our Lenten questioning.

—Fr. Samuel Torvend, Associate to the Rector for Adult Formation