FORTY DAYS AND FORTY NIGHTS

A MESSAGE FOR SEXAGESIMA SUNDAY

It’s not mentioned in today’s Mass, and unless you’re a priest or happen to read the lessons from today’s Matins in the Breviary, you wouldn’t know that the big story on Sexagesima Sunday is that of Noah’s Ark.  One of the Bible’s favorite stories, it is told to children from an early age at Sunday School and Catechism classes the world over, inspiring their young imaginations with images of animals marching two-by-two into a huge wooden ship that was to weather the biggest storm in history.

It’s a story, though, that inspires our more adult imaginations with more gruesome pictures.  When the rains came, we reflect with horror on the victims of the Great Flood.  What if this were to happen today?  It is the stuff of Hollywood movies, filled with special effects that must take us to a dark place indeed.  The entire population of the earth died in the first few hours, in most horrible circumstances, clinging on to the highest buildings, hilltops and finally mountain peaks, screaming desperately as the waters rose and finally engulfed them.

It was an act of God.  Since God created man, Adam and then his son Cain, and so on down the family tree, had continued to offend God.  It became so bad that a salutary lesson was required, and God sent the waters to submerge the world and wipe out his people who had responded to his love with sin and debauchery.  It rained for forty days and forty nights and the people drowned like rats.

When Noah’s ark finally came to rest, a rainbow appeared in the firmament of heaven, which God himself told Noah signified the covenant that God would never again destroy his people with water.  Thousands of years later, God proved his covenant, his “old” testament, by sending his Son to die in the place of his people. 

The first major event of Christ’s ministry was to sanctify the water that had destroyed his people in the days of Noah.  He was baptized in the waters of the River Jordan, and from that time, water was to be the element not of man’s destruction but of his salvation, being poured over our heads at our own baptism and washing away the original sin of Adam that had so polluted God’s creation.

After this new beginning, Christ did not immediately begin his teaching ministry.  First, he went out into the wilderness and fasted.  Just as the Great Flood of Noah had rained down for forty days and forty nights, so now the Son of God would fast for forty days and forty nights, depriving himself of all human comfort. As we prepare now to commemorate the replacement of the old testament with the new, we must be resolved to take our own Lenten fasting seriously. 

It took forty days and forty nights to wipe out the sins of the world by Noah’s Flood.  Now it will take forty days and forty nights for us to do penance and make reparation for our own sins.  It’s not a bad arrangement, is it?—the Lenten fast is our substitute for being drowned in the waters of sin, in which we stand to lose not our lives, but our souls.  In other words, we do less work to escape a worse punishment.  God is indeed merciful to us poor sinners!  So this Lent, let our response to God’s love be our own love, our own sacrifice of self and of human comfort.  In today’s long Epistle St. Paul tells us of the sacrifices he had to make in the name of his apostolate.  Let it be our inspiration to do better.