Lent, that season before Easter, is known for abstaining and fasting. But it is more than that. It’s a learning lab with a deadline.
Lent as a 40-Day Love Challenge
Ash Wednesday | Matthew 6:1-6,16-21
Today is the first day of Lent. Like many Christians, all over the world, I got up and focused on devotion. I’m listening to a reflection each day, reading Scripture, and starting this season with a kind of fasting we truly only do this time of year.
I, like many of you, like my parents before me, was taught to take this season with intention. So I do. In the past, I abstained from sweets, including artificial sweeteners. I’ve taken things on, like learning to drink black coffee. I read devotionals daily and tried over and over to practice a private faith privately, even from a very public position.
And all of this intention has a way of feeling like Christian New Year’s resolutions. Made to be broken.
At the root of all of this stuff that we associate with Lent is actually something really simple. Something we’ll hear in just a moment when I invite you to observe a Holy Lent. That if we go all the way back to those first people building our traditions, trying their best to follow Christ, we’ll find a very simple idea.
They set aside a season for learning.
The discipline itself isn’t the point. They’re trying to do something important. The kind of thing you’re not going to do unless you sit down and make yourself do it.
What they wanted to do was to learn how to do the impossible: to be open to change and forgiveness.
How to embody what Jesus told Peter years before. How many times should we forgive? Not seven times, but seven times seven. He may as well have said, how about 24/7.
We have a real advantage this year.
Every year we read this gospel from the beginning of Matthew chapter 6. But this lectionary year, we’ve already been reading from Matthew, so we’ve read much of what happens in chapter 5.
So if we go back and remember the story up to this point, we had the birth of Jesus, the flight into Egypt, and the return to the homeland. We had the baptism in the Jordan, Jesus’s 40 days in the wilderness where he was tempted, and then the calling of the disciples.
And then, after much healing and teaching, Jesus has amassed a large group of followers, so he went up a mountain to get in a good spot to project his voice to all these people. And he began to preach. But not an easy sermon about love and being nice. Something way spicier.
He started with a strange collection of blessings—that people are blessed in weakness, mourning, and challenge. They are blessed to make peace in a world that would rather kill.
And he said that you are blessed this way. To make a world that is real. A world as God wants it.
Then he challenges them by naming the rules they grew up with and essentially said Those are too easy! You need to learn how to be better than that. Imagine being a straight-A student and your teacher’s telling the class they’re getting too many As. You think the teacher’s going to grade on a curve. But instead, they say, No, I expect you all to still get As. The thing is, I think you’re not actually learning anything.
Learning to Love
Right before this passage, Jesus offers one of the most fundamentally misunderstood passages in the Bible. He says:
“‘You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer.”
Jesus is recalibrating their learning, right? You have heard it said…but I say to you… Here’s what you know and here’s what I’m telling you.
They were given the law of an eye for an eye to limit retaliation and establish consistent justice at a time when none of that was present. If somebody took your eye, you’d murder them. We hear this in our culture today: I was disrespected, so I had to… We call this retributive justice.
But the point was that we often felt justified in escalating conflict and the teaching was to restrain that conflict and regulate our response. So you don’t do more or change the punishment. Think about how comfortable we are with punishing the captive with more captivity or the poor with greater poverty. And think about how unhelpful that is to our restoring our community.
So Jesus upends that expectation, saying that they all know this law, but don’t go looking to remove other people’s eyes. Because there’s a core problem here: desire. And where does this come from? The amygdala. That’s the part of our brain I like to call the lizard brain. It jumps into action, overriding the more developed parts when we’re mad or afraid.
The amygdala is programmed to take charge and figure out how to save your life. So it’ll assess the situation and trigger your instincts for fight or flight.
Jesus’s instruction essentially tells us to hold the amygdala back so we can see that there is a third option: Not fighting OR flighting. In other words, actively standing against evil and not succumbing to it. Making peace.
belief + action = peace
This is the stuff Jesus is teaching when he gets to the part about practicing piety. He’s telling people eager to learn how to transform the world, to fulfill his great vision for the kin-dom that we need to think differently than we were taught in a few specific ways. Do these things we actually know are good things.
He says that they shouldn’t just love their friends, but figure out how to love their enemies, too. Why? That sounds insane! Except that he’s trying to help them see it: we’re building a community, which means we all need to be a part of it.
And we all get stuck in that, right? It seems impossible. An intractable divide.
Listen to the way Jesus responds to this: he makes two big arguments.
1) You get to peace by making it.
He connects their belief to action in a novel, but familiar way. If you believe something, you’ll do it. If you believe we’re all capable of being under this big tent, make it so your enemies become your friends. The question isn’t “is it possible?” because with God, everything is possible. It’s really about our willingness to give up a justified hatred to make the peace we want.
2) Doing nothing is an act of disbelief
If belief is connected to action, then doing nothing cannot be an act of someone who believes. Nor is play-acting the same as believing. These critiques of the pious, the religious, bending their faces to appear as if they are suffering—Jesus isn’t simply calling the Temple leaders hypocrites. This isn’t populist rhetoric for the sake of it. He’s showing us unbelief.
Harmonizing belief
In other words, Jesus shows us what disharmony between belief and action looks like.
Our challenge in following Christ is not simply to have the right ideas or follow the rules. It is not to judge the unworthy or protect the oppressive systems we like. And it isn’t simply to do private devotions for our own sake. Even if they make us healthier, happier, or wiser.
Our work is to be children of God. To be blessed like Jesus describes in the Beatitudes. And fundamentally seeking how to tie our belief to our action.
The 40-Day Love Challenge
So over the next 40 days, we’re invited to figure this all out.
We have 40 days to figure out how to literally love our enemies because the desire is not enough. Because it isn’t just belief, it isn’t just action, and it isn’t just your belief connecting with your action; it is we as a community literally practicing what we preach. And the church, for nearly 2000 years has given us a time limit: It’s called Lent.
Because when we get to Easter, we are widening our circle, we are bringing new people into our midst. We are bringing repentant sinners into total equality in the midst of the people. That will happen regardless of whether or not you as an individual are ready. Because the community isn’t just about you being ready, or even all of us being ready.
The community itself needs to get ready. Because this is our work. The world needs us to do our job. Communities of faith just like this one are the only places bound to the mission of true and complete reconciliation.
In other words, God needs us to show up.
This is our work in Lent. Why Jesus dares to say
“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
—Matthew 5:48
Not to set an impossible standard, but to match our belief and our action to our common goal, God’s goal of the beloved community. The perfect harmony of love, hope, and commitment to being whole, a generous collection of children, making the impossible real. Here. In a remarkably short amount of time.
That’s being perfect. Practicing our piety. Learning and becoming new.
And in the only way we can do such an audacious and ambitious project. Together.