We all know perfectly well that Lent is forty days long – or is it? Try counting the days from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday. That’s forty six days! Answer, remove the Sundays and you get your forty days. Perhaps less well appreciated is that the period from Easter Day to Whitsunday is also around forty days. Forty two on the same basis as the Lenten count, fifty including the Sundays and when counted from Easter Eve – The Passover.

Numbers are a great trap and we need to remember that the people of Jesus’ time and place often used them quite differently and much less literally than we do. The great example of this is Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness. When asked how often we should forgive – with the suggestion of seven times – he replied that seventy times seven would be more to the point. Now seven is one of those numbers used in His day and place in a much broader sense than simply the count of one to seven. It was a number with power and particular meaning and so the questioner thought that his suggestion was generous! Jesus capped his questioner’s proposal with the answer ‘No, seventy times seven.’ The answer to that is not four hundred and ninety – it is infinity, the true generosity of God.

Something rather similar applies to the Lenten forty days. It should not be understood too exactly. Forty days then and there simply meant ‘a good long time’ and was not over specific or concerned about exactly how long that was. From this we can appreciate that Jesus spent ‘a good long time’ in the wilderness.

However, the period that we are now into, the Easter season, is much more precisely calculated and directly from the Jewish

calendar. What we call ‘Whitsun’ or ‘Pentecost’ the Jews knew as ‘The Feast of Weeks’ and was a kind of harvest festival. In those seven weeks and a day from the Passover to the Feast of Weeks the crops matured and the first fruits/cut were brought to Jerusalem to be offered to God at The Temple. This is why the Pentecost account from the Book of The Acts of The Apostles makes mention of so many different people being in Jerusalem at the time. Just to add to this ‘playing with numbers’ theme, go back from Whitsun by ten days and you come to Ascension Day – forty days after the Passover – and so the Risen Christ was with us for forty days.

All this is interesting enough in its way, but has little to say about the real importance of the Easter Season. The real importance is that during that time the Disciples found themselves living a miracle. Their leader, who had died before their eyes, was again with them and very much alive. It was this time which stands as the foundation of the Christian faith and, through the Gift of The Holy Spirit, the inspiration for the early Church. For us it stands in dark days as a symbol of the hope by which we live and in which we die. I referred earlier to the infinite generosity of God; here in the very tangible form of the Risen Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit is the fruit of that generosity. That is what we need to reflect on during this glorious season of Easter.

Chris