Happy 1st Lenten Sunday! Welcome to the next forty days of your life. I’m looking forward to these weeks we’ll have together. In Lent, we’re each being given a first-person experience of an important biblical pattern. You’ll remember from the various stories of Scripture that the number forty holds special significance for Christians. We’re aware that in the order of nature, numbers provide quantitative knowledge. They’re a tool of measurement and comparison. But in the order of grace, numbers can also attain a symbolic value when God connects them to a salvific truth. So, for example, the number forty in Scripture isn’t used to measure a quantity more than 39 but less than 41. Rather, forty symbolizes the period of preparation, testing, and conversion of heart required by the journey from death to life.
To go through a ‘forty days’ experience is like following the designated trail on a map across flat terrain which has now brought you to a mountain pass. There’s no way around, you have to go through. It is the leg within a larger journey which assumes greater concentration, risk, and hardship. If you don’t traverse the pass, you can’t complete your journey, but if you fail the sacrifice of disciplining your muscles and your wits, you’ll never traverse the pass. Lent is a spiritual mountain pass of preparation, testing, and conversion. In order to complete our journey from death to life, we must—in real time and space—use these forty days to discipline our spiritual muscles and wits through the practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
Prayer—In Matthew 6:1-18, Jesus defines these three practices as the normative disciplines of Christian penance. They outline our necessary conversion of heart in respect of our three primary relationships in life. Prayer, the first penance, expresses our conversion in relation to God. It moves us from believing we are creators to accepting that we are creatures. Prayer replaces our pride and envy and gives to God the homage of our humility and gratitude. In prayer, we learn to hear our Father’s voice and trust in His provision. We learn to love His commands and to unite our human will to His divine will.
Fasting—Fasting, the second penance, expresses our conversion in relation to ourselves. It moves us from the slavery of creature comforts to the liberation of self-control. Fasting replaces our lust, sloth, and gluttony with the virtues of chastity, diligence, and temperance. In fasting, we learn to rightly order earthly goods beneath heavenly goods and gain the courage to pursue salvation with clear-minded sobriety.
Almsgiving—Almsgiving, the third penance, expresses our conversion in relation to others. It moves us from the lie of self-centered fulfillment to the truth of self-sacrificing love. Almsgiving suffocates the greed and wrath within us and impels us toward a life of generosity and patience. In giving alms, we encounter Jesus in our brothers and sisters, we learn that human dignity is inviolable, we understand that we’ll face the same members of Christ’s Body on earth as we do in heaven. “For almsgiving delivers from death, and it will purge away every sin.” Tobit 12:9.
Have you readied your backpack and your resolve? Into the mountain pass we go.
Fr. Brian