The meaning of Lent and the mystery of divine love - ABC Religion & Ethics (2024)

With the new year well underway and Easter approaching, Christians tighten their belts and deliberate over what they will give up for Lent.

Lent or Great Lent (or Great Fast) is a forty-day penitential season in the annual liturgical calendar of major Christian denominations. It is a preparation for Easter, which celebrates Christianity’s central belief — namely, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

Lent takes place during the northern hemisphere Spring and involves practices of penance, such as fasting, prayer and almsgiving. A forty-day Lenten fast became common practice among Christian communities by the fourth century CE, when church councils legislated for its universal observance.

Lent as spiritual renewal

The word “Lent” comes from the Anglo-Saxon lencten, which means “springtime”. Like Spring, Lent is a time of renewal and growth — spiritual, relational, personal — in the lead-up to the “new life” of Easter.

Lent is meant to dispose Christians to commemorate the central events or mysteries of Christianity during the “Sacred Triduum” (“sacred three days”), also known as the Paschal or Easter Triduum. The Triduum consists of Maundy (or Holy) Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday. During these days, Jesus’s last supper with his disciple, his trial, torturous “passion”, and self-sacrificial death are remembered, and then culminate in the celebration of his life-affirming resurrection.

During these three days, the most important annual liturgies are celebrated for the Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran and other Christian churches. In the Catholic Church, the rituals can be regarded as one single liturgy stretching over three days. Each church commemorates the events in different ways, though with some major similarities (such as readings of Jesus’s suffering and death from the Gospels).

The liturgies of the Sacred Triduum are a celebration and an encounter, not a historical re-enactment. They are solemn, because they involve the most important mysteries of existence: life and death, sin and evil, suffering and injustice, love and forgiveness, God and humanity. Liturgy is about ritualising an encounter with “mystery” — that is, with the deepest elements of life that cannot be easily verbalised, but can only be experienced. Liturgy expresses the ultimate meaning in our lives rather than just the facticity of things.

In other words, liturgies involve the deepest meaning and realities of life — most importantly, the mystery of existence itself and of our relationship with the source of existence (the reason why “there is anything rather than nothing”). According to Jews and Christians, the source of being, God, has reached from outside of space and time into our finite reality to relate to us and love us. For Christians, this relationship goes so far as God becoming one of us and dying and rising for our sake. None of this is for God’s benefit — for God is perfect and complete in his own life — but is done out of gratuitous love.

But Lenten observance, like all liturgy, is not just about the past. It bears upon our lives in the present. The discipline of Lent is willingly accepted only because, as the late Pope Benedict XVI wrote, in that first Easter “love has here broken through death and thus transformed fundamentally the situation of all of us.” Hence Easter is now celebrated as an ongoing “fact” of contemporary life because love is revealed as the deepest reality at the heart of all creation.

During Lent, then, Christians undertake spiritual disciplines so as to experience the joy of Easter more fully in relationship with God and others. Each Christian’s initiation through baptism recalls this joy in which the Christian is “immersed” in Jesus’s death and resurrection — in the dying of the “old life” (that is, of unhealthy attachments and hurtful ways) and the rising of new life in self-emptying and self-giving love. Thus, through the spiritual disciplines that cultivate material detachment and personal conversion, Lent calls the Christian back to that fundamental encounter with the mystery of God in baptism. In this way, their most basic commitment, vocation, and life-orientation to God, through Jesus, is renewed.

This is why Lent is the culmination of the catechumenate in many churches. The catechumenate is the official process of formation and preparation of those who wish to be baptised into the Christian church (the catechumens). In the Catholic Church, this usually takes one year, and the baptisms traditionally take place at Easter, when the newly baptised sacramentally “rise” with Christ into new life.

A time to open ourselves to the mystery of love

The Latin name for Lent is quadragesima, which means “fortieth” and refers to the “forty days” of its duration. An exact count of forty days was not always a concern for early Christians, because the focus was primarily on the spiritual preparation for Easter. Nevertheless, consistent practices and rules developed across Eastern Christianity (based around Constantinople) and Western Christianity (based around Rome).

The forty days have been calculated and observed somewhat differently in the East and the West. Sundays in Western Christianity came to be excluded from the Lenten discipline of penance and fasting. Meanwhile, the Eastern churches adhered to a continuous forty-day fast, though often with certain allowances made for Saturdays and Sundays (such as the use of wine and olive oil). Since Sundays are a celebration of Jesus’s resurrection, the Western church regarded penitential practices as inappropriate. Even still, the Sunday liturgies during Lent in the Catholic Church have a more muted sense — so, for instance, there is no use of “Alleluia” and the ancient hymn “the Gloria”.

Because when the forty days of Lent begins and when Easter occurs have been calculated differently in the East and the West, subtle variations have developed in the Orthodox churches and the Catholic Church respectively. For the Catholic Church, Lent begins on Ash Wednesday and extends for just over six weeks, with the forty days of penance excluding Sundays. While the Holy Triduum is not officially regarded as part of Lent, the Lenten discipline continues until Easter Sunday.

For the Orthodox churches, Lent starts on Clean Monday and involves forty consecutive days of fasting, with different levels of fasting depending on capacity and devotion. Fasting continues into Holy Week (the week starting with Palm Sunday and extending to Easter). Thus Lent and Holy Week together extend to seven weeks.

Why forty days? It recalls Jesus’s forty-day sojourn in the desert at the beginning of his public ministry (as recorded in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke), during which time he fasted and was spiritually tested in a similar way to the great Israelite prophets, Moses and Elijah. It also recalls the forty days of rain during the Great Flood when the world was renewed following great violence. Finally, it recalls the forty years of Israel’s wandering in the desert when its identity was formed and where it put God to the test.

Fasting as spiritual detachment

Fasting was one of the original practices of Lent and remains central to its observance. While it has more recently come into vogue for health reasons, fasting is a long-standing religious tool for spiritual renewal. As an ascetical practice important to Judaism and practiced by Jesus, Christians continued its use.

Fasting has been practiced in different ways throughout at least 1700 years of Lenten tradition. It originally involved complete abstinence from food, including meat, fish, eggs, and dairy (which is still practiced by some Eastern Christians). In contemporary Catholic practice, fasting is prescribed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. During these days, only one major meal is taken (following historical practice) and no meat is eaten. On the other days of Lent, some form of penance is undertaken, such as abstinence from some food (such as red meat) or other habits, activities and possessions, and prayer, charitable works and almsgiving are increased. In the Eastern churches, a stricter fast can be undertaken during weekdays during Lent.

Fasting, for Christians, is not primarily an act to purify oneself before engaging in ritual. Rather, it is a spiritual discipline that seeks to tame bodily desire, in order to focus on spiritual and personal growth. Rather than being controlled by one’s desires, one can purify one’s heart and one’s relationship with God, thereby renewing one’s baptismal vocation and commitment.

In this way, fasting exemplifies the Christian aim of ongoing conversion or metanoia (which is sometimes translated “repentance”). Metanoia involves a radical change of mind and heart, a turning away from self-centredness and towards loving relationship with God and others. Fasting, then, challenges the Christian, in a measured way, to forget oneself in order to live for God and others — especially the poor.

Fasting recalls the tradition of “spiritual warfare” which acknowledged the challenge of breaking free from prideful, self-centred egoism and acquisitiveness. It also reminds Christians of their finitude and mortality as creatures, while emphasising that they are not just animals but spiritual creatures capable of transcendent, loving relationships and meaning.

For Christians, fasting — like almsgiving and prayer — is a physical symbol of spiritual detachment, in which one empties oneself as Jesus did when he became human and then died on the Cross in self-giving love. Christians are called to “empty-out” (kenosis) themselves like Jesus, so to be filled with God’s love (in prayer) and be available for service to others (almsgiving).

Fasting, moreover, aims to cultivate interior freedom from sin and evil in all their forms, especially egotistical self-centredness, pride, acquisitiveness, and domination. It seeks to test one’s deepest hunger and perceive what one truly desires. In this way, fasting, as a spiritual practice, recalls the existential yearnings that all humans have for a full and flourishing life. These yearnings guide what we do and who we are.

Lent, particularly through fasting, reminds Christians of these fundamental yearnings and asks whether they are being addressed in healthy or unhealthy ways. In this way, Lent involves a process of decluttering in a spirit of minimalism that combines with prayer and good works, so as to be more open and receptive to God’s love.

The journey to Easter

By focusing on existential hunger and spiritual receptiveness, Lent ultimately points to the fullness of life found in Jesus at Easter (or Pascha in Greek and Latin, which means “Passover”).

All of Lent’s penitential practices and acts of spiritual renewal find their meaning in the journey of self-emptying and self-giving love that Jesus undertakes in his death and resurrection: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love” (John 15:9).

In this way, Christians discover that they can make the Paschal journey with Jesus, just as they have made the Lenten journey, because they — along with all humanity — are loved and “loved lavishly”, as Draško Dizdar writes, “gratuitously; yes, even recklessly, exultantly; indeed, absolutely and unconditionally, by the One [God] who knows us better than we know ourselves, and yet desires nothing other than that we should all flourish in the radiant light of his love.”

This journey of love is first made by Christians sacramentally in baptism, and then is spiritually renewed at Lent. With Jesus as companion and guide, Christians are moved to “passover” from the “world” of selfishness, evil, and pain into the gratuitous and unconditional love of God experienced at Easter.

Joel Hodge is Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology at Australian Catholic University, and the author of Violence in the Name of God: The Militant Jihadist Response to Modernity.