The Lenten Journey      

It is Luke’s Gospel that highlights the Lenten journey.  In Luke 9:51 we have these words, ‘When the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem’.  Thus it begins, Jesus’ journey from Galilee to Jerusalem.  In Galilee Jesus had roamed the countryside proclaiming the good news and acting out God’s saving love.  For several years, Jesus brought the Kingdom of God to the people, casting out demons, healing the sick, and calling disciples to follow him.  But all that public display and witness is over.  Now he is on his way to his final destiny, from a ministry of healing and compassion to a ministry of suffering and death. 
           During this journey, Jesus turns his focus from the crowds to his disciples.  He teaches and admonishes them, preparing them for the passion events and for the time after his ascension.  Much of this they would not understand until they experienced that first Easter and he had ascended.  But the journey was important.  To fully understand they too had to travel from Galilee to Golgotha.
           Each Lent, we as 21^st century disciples repeat this journey.  We walk, as it were, with Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem.  We are the disciples who listen to him as he teaches us the hard truths we need to learn.  As we walk with Jesus along the way, he challenges us. 
           In the early church, the Christian faith was called ‘the Way’.  It is in the walking with Jesus and in the learning from Jesus that we are formed in our faith.  The Lenten journey is distinctive in that it takes us to the cross and ultimately to Easter glory.  For it is only by travelling to the cross that we can see Jesus lifted up.   In seeing him nailed to a cross, we are faced with God’s ultimate act of love for our redemption.  Being confronted by it all once again in all its horror and in all its glory, we are compelled to respond.   When the cross stands before us against the black sky, we are forced to decide if we can truly embrace this faith, to walk in this Way.
           This is a journey many of us have walked before.  In many ways it is a familiar journey, yet it is new each time.  As earthen, weak, and incomplete disciples, we need to make the journey each year.  In the repetition there is renewed commitment and new discovery.  Our busy, hectic lives crowd out our discipleship.  Our many commitments complicate our lives and distract us along the way.  So every now and again, we need to reorient our way of living, recapture our sense of purpose, and renew our true devotion. Lent and Holy Week is a time for refocusing our lives.  Each time we make this journey, we are given a new opportunity to discover what we did not see the last time. 
           So we press on in our Lenten journey walking on the way, looking ahead to our arrival in Jerusalem and the events of Holy week and that bright Easter morn.