Lent Day 10: 40 days

Off the top of my head, I can come up with about three examples of the number 40 in scripture:

The forty days and nights of rain, the great flood of Genesis and Noah and pairs of animals.

The forty years God's covenant people were in the wilderness.

The forty days Jesus was in the wilderness.

And... those are, to me, the Big Three.

But our Presbyterian Book of Common Worship highlights these and more in a litany for Lent. We are reminded that...

Moses spent forty days on the mountain, learning the commandments of God.

Elijah traveled forty days in the wilderness to hear the voice of God in the silence,

Jonah cried out to the people of Nineveh, Repent, or in forty days you will perish.

In scripture, forty is a number that makes you sit up and take notice. When something lasts forty days (or years) the story you are reading involves a sea change in the people affected. From the re-fashioning of the human race after God's deadly flooding, to the prophet Elijah running for his life, waiting for the still, quiet voice of God to suddenly become audible to him, to Jesus undergoing grueling testing of his physical strength and moral character, things change. People are changed. In the story of God's people in the wilderness after their escape from enslavement, it is made clear that a new people will enter the land of promise--literally. Nearly all the original escapees will have died, including Moses and his siblings, Miriam and Aaron. The spies Joshua and Caleb are the only two of the original 600,000 who cross over. God wants them to be a new people, and so they are.

We observe Lent for forty days because of similar reasoning. At the end, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, new life emerging from a tomb, new life that seems impossible, yet, there it is. And the idea of Lent-- the traditional idea--is that we will be new, too. In the ancient church, following a lengthy process of study and prayer, converts were baptized at the Easter Vigil. We are made new.

This year we are approaching Lent from a different perspective. It is still a time of transformation, but the desired transformation is not that we have given up something or taken on a strict discipline of some kind. The transformation that we all need most deeply is to finally believe that God loves us, and there is nothing we can do about it. 

We can run away from it, we can doubt it, we can try to block it out, but we can't make it stop. 

We can mess up, we break down, we can refuse to budge, but God is still love.

I have often wondered whether the forty days of Lent were based on a basic hunch about how long it takes to establish a pattern, or form a habit. The conventional wisdom is that it takes 21 days to form a habit, but I've always believed that wasn't long enough. They've done a study (of course), and it turns out, most people will take between 18 and (gulp) 254 days to form and solidify a habit. Lent can, at the very least, give you a good start.

For Lent this year, I encourage all of us to take up the habit of trusting in God's love for us. That's it, that's the message.

God loves us, and there's not a thing we can do about it.

Color against the white of snow.
Artist: Joanne Thorne Arnold