What's in a Number?

[A reflection on the Gospel for the First Sunday in Lent, March 9, 2025, which may be found here.]

Forty whole days.

That's Lent, forty whole dreary days of making one's self miserable. Or is it? Not really.

If you count the days starting from Ash Wednesday and head to Easter, you have forty-six days. What's up with that? Well, it started with Holy Week as the period of the pre-Paschal fast. Then someone got the great idea to expand it to forty, so they pushed it up to the 6th Sunday to give, oh, wait, that's forty-nine days. So Holy Week became dissociated with Lent to yield forty-two days. Well, that's not right, either. So they took the Sundays out. Erm, that brought it down to thirty-five, and then they added Ash Wednesday and the remaining weekdays to give...wait for it...thirty-nine.

Close enough, I guess.

Why the fascination with forty? Why not seven? Or the jubilee number of forty-nine? In Israelite tradition, which came down to both Jews and Christians, the number forty occurs time and again to mark times of transition, renewal, and change. The rains of the Flood occurred over forty days and nights to renew the Earth. Moses received the transforming Law from God while on Mt. Sinai forty days. The Israelites wandered the wilderness forty years as they were forged into a new people. The Prophet Elijah wandered the wilderness forty days to be renewed and recharged by God. Lastly, after His Baptism in the Jordan River, Our Lord spent forty days fasting in the wilderness to prepare for the great work of His mission.

So in preparing for the baptisms occurring on the Easter Vigil, the early Church thought forty would be a great number of days for the "home stretch" to effect the transformation sought in that great Sacrament. For those already baptised, the number forty was considered a goodly number of days to prepare for the transformation effected by the drama of the annual commemoration of the Christian Passover. For those who had been lax or even careless throughout the year, it was considered a good number of days to bring them back to good habits of prayer, acts of mercy, and self-denial, which are supposed to be followed the whole year and not just the forty days. The idea that the transformation effected by forty days of prayer and fasting readied Our Lord to withstand not only the temptations of the Devil but to withstand the trials of His coming ministry then is transferred to us so that we not only withstand the temptations of the Devil but also withstand the trials of our coming service to the Kingdom of God.

May these forty-ish days be days of growth and strength for us all to withstand the trials to come.