Forty days. Three Lenten practices. Seven corporal works of mercy and seven spiritual works of mercy. Fourteen Stations of the Cross.
Liturgically, the beginning of Lent feels something like the first week of elementary school when the law is laid down and lists are memorized. It’s time to return to obedience, to standard operating procedures. As today’s Scripture says: “[The Lord] is to be your God and you are to walk in his ways and observe his statutes, commandments and decrees.” Liturgical and moral law, as any law, function to minimize ambiguity in the determination of behavior as good or bad, just or unjust. The administration of law means the drawing of lines. But we must remember: these laws are vessels of God’s regard for us. And yet the grace that law cannot contain is caught in another, greater vessel called mercy. Lent and Easter invite us to partake of both.
Jesus urges us to imitate the Father’s perfection, which, as he makes explicit, transcends the line between just and unjust, seeming not even to notice it: “[God] makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” The categories “just” and “unjust” grow faint against the background of the Father’s still-greater energy of generosity, warm like the sun, gentle and forgiving like rain.
Ultimately, the Lenten journey is not like a year of elementary school, not an exercise in rote obedience. The Lenten laws, rules, and lists in fact signal the re-inauguration of the one Christian journey, repeated each Passiontide and across our entire lives: from law to grace, from confessed sinner to tender child of God’s sun and rain.

Justin Bartkus

Justin Bartkus is a human-centered designer living in Chicago, Illinois.