Deepening our Christian lives requires us to develop what St Paul calls the mind of Christ, and we might think of the experience of each Lent as offering an opportunity to deepen formation and renew our catechesis.
Secular culture understands Lent only in terms of self-improvement, which in itself is an idolatrous focus on the ego whose seduction we need to resist.
How can we most effectively resist that initial temptation? By learning to see Lent as the divine drama of the first covenant, which offers us an interpretive story for our own pilgrimage deeper into the journey Christ calls us to travel.
It begins with the significance of a number. When we see the number 40, we know immediately that God intends some form of calibration of our condition.
There were 40 days of rain in the Flood (Genesis 7–8).
There were 40 days on Sinai while Moses received the law (Exodus 24:18).
There were 40 years of wandering in the wilderness on the way to the promised land (Numbers 14:33–34).
There were 40 days for Elijah on his journey to Horeb to encounter God in stripped-down silence and vulnerability (1 Kings 19:8).
Forty in scripture signals testing and preparation. It is the time between God’s promise and His fulfilment, between our collapse and our renewal.
The Church did not randomly select a number. She inherited a series of experiences. Lent is Israel’s testing time compressed into a sacramental season. In Lent we journey with Jesus into the desert to experience the medicine of self-denial and confrontation with temptation. But Jesus was repeating and amplifying the 40 years of desert wandering of the people of Israel.
Deuteronomy 8:2–3 tells us that God used the disobedience of Israel and the subsequent desert wandering “that He might humble and test you to make you know that man does not live by bread alone”.
Lent is about reorientating desire, calibrating appetite and reducing illusion. To re-orientate our desires and calibrate our appetite, we reduce food, limit distraction and curb indulgence. It is not the food that is unclean or evil. It is not food that is unclean or evil. It is the illusion that we live by food alone.
Lent is a process of moving from illusion to truth, from inaccuracy to clarity. In the desert the people of Israel were tempted to make their own god out of a sculptured calf. In the desert Jesus relived the temptation to rely on self-sufficiency and repulsed Satan (for us) where ancient Israel failed.
Our preparation in the desert will re-orientate us so that we can receive Jesus afresh as the Lamb of God. But to do so we need to understand the symbolism of the lamb combined with the meaning of the scapegoat.
Why is Jesus the Lamb of God and not the Goat of God? Because Passover is the deeper event. It was the lamb who provided the passage – the free passage from slavery to liberation, from death to life. Jesus begins by repeating and acting as the scapegoat and becomes the lamb. The scapegoat is expelled to remove guilt (Leviticus 16), but the lamb is offered to give life. We need both.
Jesus is called the Lamb of God because His death is not only about removing guilt. It is about defeating death, establishing a new freedom from slavery that reaches into the realm of the spirit beyond the body.
What does secular culture understand about scapegoats? It creates them all the time. It can grasp Jesus as scapegoat if we can explain the notion of sin to our neighbours. Our culture knows how to transfer guilt, how to expel, how to cancel. But it does not understand forgiveness. It flinches from death and, with abortion, euthanasia and violence, enculturates death, but knows nothing about the promise of new life.
But to a society fixated on power, the real surprise is the willing victimhood of the Lamb. The lamb takes God’s rescue plan beyond forgiveness. Through the sacrifice of the lamb, God will save us from the plague of death. The blood of the lamb will mark us as safe from God’s response to intransigence, stubbornness and pride that provoked the angel of death.
Lent is not self-improvement for the ego; it is entering a drama that recalibrates desire, exposes illusion, transfers guilt, defeats death and prepares us to stand in renewed life before the Lamb (the vision of the Apocalypse) – who reigns precisely because He was slain.
All of this would remain moral inspiration if it were not gathered into the single Person of Jesus. Christ does not abolish Israel’s story; instead, He inhabits it, develops it, incarnates it, empowers it, transforms it and then does the same to and with us. For us, He goes into the desert, fasts 40 days, answers temptation with Deuteronomy, becomes the scapegoat, is the lamb and inaugurates the new Exodus.
Israel rehearsed Lent historically, but Jesus embodied it perfectly. What His physical body on earth endured and achieved, His body as Church now participates in sacramentally.
Without Christ, Lent is moral effort. In Christ, Lent becomes participation. Where we fail, He succeeds for us. In Lent, He simply asks us to embark on the journey beside Him.
