Lent is the season of preparation for Easter. It is not merely a few weeks during which we try to feel especially bad about Christ’s suffering or about our sin, but it is rather time to prepare for a celebration of his resurrection.
St. Paul connected Easter to our baptisms when he wrote, “We died and were buried with Christ by Baptism. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives” (Romans 6:4). It is for this new life that we prepare in these weeks of Lent. Our aim and purpose is that when our Lord is raised at Easter, he will find us prepared and ready to enter into new life with him. That means we use these weeks to examine ourselves to discover attitudes, practices, and habits belonging to the old life that have crept back in during this last year and get rid of them permanently. That is called “repentance.” But we cannot accomplish that without the help and leading of the Holy Spirit; and so Lent is also a time of special prayer and worship.
The forty days of Lent are the product of long development in the history of the church.
The early New Testament church observed a celebration called the “Pascha,” a single commemoration of both Christ’s sufferings and glorious resurrection. In Rome, this involved a fast from 6 p.m. Saturday until Communion at about 3 a.m. on Sunday at the Easter vigil service.
That fast was eventually extended to 40 hours long, from Good Friday until Easter Sunday.
By the middle 200s A.D., this fast had been extended to six days, becoming what we today call Holy Week. And by the end of the 200s, the church at Jerusalem was celebrating Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter as separate festivals.
In 325 A.D., the Council of Nicaea recorded the first reference to a period of 40 days of Lent. Excluding the Sundays (which are always “little Easters” year-round), Lent therefore begins on Ash Wednesday and lasts until Good Friday. Later, these forty days were associated with Jesus’ forty days in the desert during his temptation (Matthew 4:1–11) and to the forty years the children of Israel spent in the wilderness (Numbers 14:34).
