Spiritual Reflection, March 2024
Lent: Fed by Manna in the Desert
On February 14, the Western Church marked the beginning of the liturgical season of Lent, which Eastern Orthodox begin on March 18. Lent can be lived as a way of focusing on three aspects of our life as Jewish disciples of Yeshua: love for Am Israel (the people of Israel), love for Yeshua, and love for His ecclesial Body.
This liturgical season weaves together three dramas widely separated in time. First, the forty days of Lent are a liturgical reliving of the forty years the people of Israel spent wandering in the desert between the crossing of the Red Sea and the crossing of the Jordan. Second, Lent is a reliving of Yeshua’s forty days of prayer, fasting, and temptation in the desert, and a recapitulation of His public ministry from His temptations to His Passion. Third, with a focus on almsgiving and reconciliation, Lent is a time of solidarity with the great needs and hopes of the world today, as well as solidarity in prayer and fasting with catechumens preparing to be spiritually refashioned in the waters of baptism during the Easter Vigil.
The forty years of the wandering of Israel in the desert, which sets the tone for this liturgical season, were both a time of unique intimacy with God for the Chosen People, and a time of temptation and trial as His people had to rely completely on God for sustenance. Lent is often treated by Christians as a period of self-help in which we pick what we want to renounce. Israel, however, picked neither the desert nor the manna that fed them. Lent is about renouncing the illusion of self-sufficiency.
As Israel lived on manna in the desert, we are to live from the bread from heaven that Yeshua gives us. This means welcoming His presence in faith and walking with Him, as the Lord dwelt with the people of Israel and walked with them in the Tent of Meeting as He led them by the Spirit. Secondly, it means receiving His total gift of self, represented by the manna and contained in the Eucharist. Third, it means offering our “bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom 12:1), in profound solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Israel, in our different ecclesial realities, and in the world.
Lawrence Feingold