The Reason for Lent

This is an excerpt from the introduction of Stretched: A Study for Lent and the Entire Christian Life by Christopher Richmann (1517 Publishing, 2026).

Where Did Lent Come From?

Despite the outsized importance of Christmas in American culture today, the day of Jesus’ resurrection is more important historically than the day of his birth. [2] As the New Testament tells us, Jesus rose from the dead on a Sunday. Christians almost immediately gravitated to this day of the week as the preferred day for worship, each Sunday being a mini celebration of Christ’s resurrection. And early on, the joy of Christ’s defeat of death contrasted with more gloomy days of fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays in remembrance of Jesus’ betrayal and crucifixion. Because Jesus’ resurrection also overlapped with the annual Jewish festival of Passover, it made sense to celebrate Christ’s resurrection not only weekly, but also every year around the same time. And again, believers balanced the delight of the resurrection with days of mournful fasting before it—first just a few days, then as time went on, a full week of fasting preceded Easter Sunday in some places. Eventually, believer’s imaginations were taken with the notion that the pre-Easter fast should last forty days, an echo of Jesus fasting in the wilderness. Because the church regarded Sundays as “feast” days by default, they could not be used in the calculation. Consequently, a forty-day fast leading up to Easter began on Wednesday of the seventh week before Resurrection Sunday.

The theological gravity of Easter (Romans 4:25 says that Christ was “raised for our justification”) brought two other practices into its orbit. Before infant baptism became the norm, the church often received converts to Christianity by baptizing them on Easter. They were, in effect, dying and rising with Christ (see Rom 6:4). Over time, the church also gained experience with flagrant sinners or those who renounced the faith wanting to return. The church opted for forgiveness but also required public repentance before receiving them back into the fold in the days just before Easter. Based on biblical examples, this repentance often included putting ashes on one’s body or face. Eventually, this practice spread to all Christians in Western Europe, so that Lent began for all with the observance of Ash Wednesday. This tradition of ashes on the Wednesday beginning Lent has continued strong for a thousand years.

Lent: A Collision of Theological Truths

I do not write this book to convince you to observe Lent. Although I think there are good reasons to participate in recurring shared worship practices that have a long pedigree in the church, the real gift of Lent is that it brings together so many important theological truths.

The longer I serve in public ministry, the more I appreciate that what we confront intentionally and systematically in Lent are the vital arteries of the Christian life in all seasons.

These truths are certainly not the entirety of Christian faith, but they address inescapable realities for those saved by grace through faith. I’m not trying to have a unique or novel take on Lent; that would probably be at odds with the spirit of Lent, anyway. So, although academic works in history and theology have shaped my ideas (and I’ll point to some of these in footnotes), this book is much more the fruit of my pastoral experience. Every year, I return with my congregation to the season of Lent. Coming between the awe of Christmas-Epiphany and the triumph of Easter, this dark season can feel like a long, unnecessary independent clause in the sentence that is the liturgical year. But the longer I serve in public ministry, the more I appreciate that what we confront intentionally and systematically in Lent are the vital arteries of the Christian life in all seasons. Reflecting on one of these themes more than five hundred years ago, Martin Luther insisted that the “entire life of the believer is one of repentance.” The same applies to the other Lenten themes I explore in this book: death, denial, temptation, and good works.

By quoting Luther, I show my theological cards. I was baptized and confirmed in Lutheran churches. I am an ordained Lutheran minister. But I was not always a Lutheran. For nearly a decade, coinciding perfectly with my teenage years, I considered myself a Pentecostal or charismatic Christian. And although I circled back to Lutheranism in early adulthood, I will eternally be grateful to God for my years in evangelical and charismatic communities. To be sure, I have left behind many of the beliefs and practices that are common in those communities. But I will forever maintain that it was in a Pentecostal church that the Holy Spirit made the gospel click for me in a way that, for whatever reason, it had not before—that Christ died for my sins.

God’s word is clear that one cannot understand death without understanding self-denial, repentance, temptation, or good works

To the extent that any church proclaims such good news, it is because they find it in Scripture. The Bible belongs to all Christians. In what follows, I will often cite Luther or Lutheran documents. But I do this not to be partisan or to try to persuade readers to become Lutheran. Rather, I do this because I believe that the Lutheran movement is, at its best, particularly clear on how we move from reading Scripture to preaching the gospel. As such, thinking “with” Luther and other Lutherans has become my theological habit. But that habit means at the same time always thinking with Scripture, and you’ll see this in the chapters that follow. [3]

Although the church never officially worked out its theology of Lent, the themes of this season demonstrate a remarkable coherence. I believe this is because of the church’s historic reliance upon Scripture for its language of worship. In other words, God’s word is clear that one cannot understand death without understanding self-denial, repentance, temptation, or good works; and this holds true for each theme in relation to all the others. Although it is rarely stated this way, I contend that a common thread in these themes is that in each of these experiences, we are describing ways that God acts upon us.

The time of year when the days are stretched is an excellent metaphor for the ways God stretches us.

For some, this may seem to turn Lent on its head. With all the talk of repentance, fasting, and good works, one can easily get the impression that of all the seasons of the church year, this one is about what we do. Even when thinking about temptation, the emphasis seems to be on what we must do to resist, overcome, or avoid it. But when we explore the Scriptures that address these themes and view them in the light of the gospel, we find more going on. In the ways God creates us and continually maintains our lives, we are dependent creatures; this is all the more so when it comes to our redemption. We are clay in the divine potter’s hands (Jer 18:1‑11; Isa 64:8). As Luther testified, all believers will suffer God’s ongoing work, which Luther described graphically as being “stretched out with Christ.” [4]

The word “stretch” has many shades of meaning. On one hand, we might say we are “stretched too thin” when we have an unhealthy amount of stress in our lives. On the other hand, we might say “that really stretched me” to describe an experience that helped us grow. But what Luther had in mind with this word is profound vulnerability, suffering what is done to us by another, with no defenses—just like Christ on the cross. As a description of the Christian life, “stretched” is a fitting way to approach Lent: the time of year when the days are stretched is an excellent metaphor for the ways God stretches us. To hint at the themes of the following chapters, we confess that it is God who kills and makes alive, imposes fasts, tests faith, gives repentance, and brings forth good deeds out of repentance. When it comes to God’s actions upon us, we may often be conscious of this “stretching,” and we may even experience it as growth. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is suffering in the truest sense, and we are never in control or command of the many ways God reconciles himself to his enemies in Christ’s death and resurrection.

The Reason for Lent