Here is the condensed 5-minute version based on this page.
Lent: Its Roots in Passover and Pentecost
A 5-Minute Talk for Senior Sunday School
Good morning, everyone. We’re well into Lent, and I thought it would be meaningful to ask a question we don’t often think about: Where did Lent actually come from? The answer takes us back to the Jewish Passover — and what we find might surprise and deepen us.
From what I learned, Sue was correct in saying that Lent is not an event cited in the Hebrew or Christian Bible.
Where did the name Lent come from?
The English term Lent comes from early Germanic/Old English roots (500-1000 CE) referring to springtime, when the days grow longer. It is a seasonal term that the church applied to the pre‑Easter fast held in spring.
Back to the Passover – Let’s not forget Jesus was a rabbi, a teacher of the Jewish faith, and surely celebrated the Passover.
Lent evolved many years after the celebration of Easter
Most of us grew up assuming Lent was always part of Christianity. But it wasn’t. The earliest church practiced only a short fast of one or two days right before Easter. The first mention of any pre-Easter fast comes from a bishop named Irenaeus of Lyon around 180 CE, and he noted that Christians couldn’t even agree on how long to fast nor what day to celebrate Easter.
It wasn’t until the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE — nearly three centuries after Jesus — that the council legislated the date for Easter.
Why Forty Days?
The answer is in our Bibles. Moses fasted forty days on Sinai (Exodus 24:18 ASV). Elijah traveled forty days to the mountain of God (1 Kings 19:8 ASV). And Matthew tells us Jesus “fasted forty days and forty nights” in the wilderness (Matthew 4:2 NRSV). When the early church stretched their fast to forty days, they were deliberately wrapping their practice in that powerful biblical symbolism. Our Lent says: we journey through the wilderness with Jesus.
The Deep Connection to Passover and Pentecost
Here’s where it gets really interesting. Easter itself began as a reinterpretation of Passover. The earliest Christians were Jewish, and they understood the death of Jesus through the lens of the Passover lamb. Paul wrote, “our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7 NRSV). The word “paschal,” — which we still use — actually means Passover. So the pre-Easter fast that became our Lent grew directly from Jewish preparation around Passover time.
And the great Passover story i.e. God’s people liberated from Egypt: passing through the Red Sea, wandering forty years in the wilderness
became the very framework for the celebrations of Lent, baptism, and Easter. The Red Sea crossing is our baptism. Lent is our wilderness. Easter morning is our arrival at the Promised Land.
Pentecost completes the arc. Just as the Jewish feast of Shavuot [giving of the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai] fell fifty days after Passover, Pentecost falls fifty days after Easter. The whole sweep — Lent, Easter, Pentecost — mirrors the Jewish journey from Passover to the giving of the Spirit at Sinai. The Christian year has its deepest bones in the Jewish calendar.
Baptisms – Parallel to all that was the common practice of having baptisms at Easter. The 40 days was then used for teaching the new converts before their baptism. There is also the view that the weather was much better for being dunked in a pool of water or stream. That brings up the very interesting fact about the winters in the Levant and Rome.
Being baptised in the spring is better than in the winter. How cold did it get in the Levant and around the Mediterranean? Where above the equator is Jerusalem compared to Mobile?
What This Means for Us
By celebrating Lent, Easter, Pentecost, we are imitating Jesus’ passover celebration.
Our faith has deep, living roots in Israel’s story. We are not separate from that story — we are grafted into it. Paul said we Gentiles are grafted into the olive tree that is Israel [Romans 11]. And Lent invites us to see these forty days as a genuine wilderness time — a time to simplify, to pray, to allow God to strip away the distractions, so that when Easter morning comes, we enter the Promised Land
Closing Prayer
Lord, we ask for your help and guidance with our prayer requests. We pledge to walk this Lenten journey as your people have always walked through the wilderness — not alone, but together, and always toward the light. AMEN
Thanks be to God.
Here is a 7-minute talk suitable for a senior Sunday school class in a Methodist Church:
Lent: Its Roots in Passover and Pentecost
A 7-Minute Talk for Senior Sunday School
Good morning, everyone. We’re well into Lent now, and I thought it would be meaningful this week to step back and ask a question we don’t often think about: Where did Lent actually come from? The answer takes us all the way back to the Jewish Passover — and what we find might surprise and deepen us.
Lent Is Not as Ancient as We Might Think
Most of us grew up assuming Lent was always part of Christianity. But scholars who study the early church tell us it wasn’t. There is no clear evidence the apostles observed a forty-day Lent. Instead, what we find in the earliest church records is simply a short, intense fast of one or two days right before Easter — not forty days.
The first mention of any pre-Easter fast comes from a bishop named Irenaeus of Lyon, writing around 180 CE, and he noted that Christians couldn’t even agree on how long to fast, let alone on forty days. It wasn’t until the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE — nearly three centuries after Jesus — that a forty-day Lent began to be standardized. So Lent, as we practice it, grew gradually, shaped by the needs of the church over time.
Why Forty Days? The Answer Is in Our Bibles
The obvious question is: why forty days? The answer is beautifully scriptural, even if it was applied to Lent after the fact. Think of the great “forties” of the Bible. In the ASV, we read that Moses was on Mount Sinai forty days and forty nights (Exodus 24:18). Elijah traveled forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God (1 Kings 19:8). And in the NRSV, Matthew tells us that Jesus “fasted forty days and forty nights” in the wilderness (Matthew 4:2).
These three great figures — Moses, Elijah, and Jesus — all spent forty days in a kind of solitary, prayerful endurance. When the early church stretched their pre-Easter fast into forty days, they were deliberately wrapping their practice in that powerful biblical symbolism. Our Lent says: we, too, journey through the wilderness with Jesus.
The Deep Connection to Passover
Now here’s where it gets really interesting. Lent is rooted in Passover far more deeply than most of us realize.
Easter itself began as a reinterpretation of Passover. The very earliest Christians were Jewish, and they observed the Passover and understood the death of Jesus through the lens of the Passover lamb. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7, NRSV). Easter was Passover, reinterpreted. The word “paschal” — which we still use in phrases like the “paschal mystery” — actually comes from the Greek word for Passover.
For the first few centuries, Jewish Christians still celebrated on the fourteenth of the Jewish month of Nisan, alongside the Jewish community. It was the Council of Nicaea in 325 that mandated Easter be moved to a Sunday and separated from the Jewish calendar — a very deliberate decision.
So the pre-Easter fast that eventually became our Lent grew directly out of the Jewish practice of fasting and preparation around Passover time. And the great theological story of Passover — God’s people liberated from slavery, passing through the Red Sea, wandering forty years in the wilderness before entering the Promised Land — became the very skeleton of how the church understands Lent, baptism, and Easter. The Red Sea crossing is our baptism. Lent is our wilderness. Easter morning is our arrival at the Promised Land.
And What About Pentecost?
Lent’s connection to Pentecost is perhaps less obvious, but it’s there. The Jewish feast of Shavuot — the Feast of Weeks — falls fifty days after Passover and celebrated both the grain harvest and the giving of the Torah at Sinai. Christians reinterpreted that fifty-day arc as the time from Easter to Pentecost, the giving of the Holy Spirit, as described in Acts 2.
Scholars believe the early church understood the full arc as a single, unified story: Lent is preparation and wilderness; Easter Vigil is new birth through baptism; and Pentecost is the gift of the Spirit and entrance into new life. It mirrors, almost exactly, the Jewish journey from Passover to Shavuot. The Christian liturgical year has its deepest bones in the Jewish calendar.
What This Means for Us
So what do we take from all this as United Methodist Christians?
First, it reminds us that our faith has deep, living roots in Israel’s story. We are not separate from that story — we are grafted into it, as Paul says. Our Lent is not a different journey from the Exodus; it is the Exodus, experienced anew each year.
Second, it reminds us that many of our practices developed over time, guided by the Holy Spirit working through the community of faith. Lent wasn’t handed down in a single moment — it grew, it evolved, it deepened. That’s not a weakness; that’s the church being alive.
And third — most practically — it invites us to see these forty days not as a ritual obligation but as a genuine wilderness time. A time to simplify, to pray, to fast in whatever way is right for us, to allow God to strip away the things that distract us from what matters, so that when Easter morning comes, resurrection feels like what it is: the most real thing in the world.
As we continue this Lenten journey together, may we walk it as God’s people have always walked through the wilderness — not alone, but together, and always toward the light.
Thanks be to God.
From what I learned, Sue was correct in saying that Lent is not an event cited in the Hebrew or Christian Bible.
Where did the name Lent come from?
The English term Lent comes from early Germanic/Old English roots (500-1000 CE) referring to springtime, when the days grow longer. It is a seasonal term that the church applied to the pre‑Easter fast held in spring. In Latin and Greek, the season was not called “Lent” but “the Forty”: Latin Quadragesima and Greek Tessarakostē, both meaning “fortieth,” referring to the 40 days before Easter. [en.wikipedia]
How did the event evolve that came to be called Lent? We need to back up to Passover & Easter.
Easter itself is historically entangled with Passover. The earliest Christian paschal celebration was not a separate holiday — it was Passover, reinterpreted. Jewish believers in Jesus observed Passover (14 Nisan) and understood the death of Jesus through the lens of the Passover lamb (1 Corinthians 5:7). Pre-Passover fasting existed in Judaism.
1st–2nd centuries: No Lent existed. Early Christians fasted before Easter, but only for 1–2 days. The Didache (c. 100 CE) and Justin Martyr mention brief pre-baptismal fasting, nothing resembling a 40-day observance.
Move Forward to the early 3rd century: Easter was celebrated on different days in different churches. First hints of an extended fast. Tertullian and Origen mention fasting periods, but these were short, variable, and not universally observed. There was no standardized practice. for baptism and repentance
By the 3rd century, fasting before Easter had expanded in meaning and length. Scholars note two main purposes: Public penance for serious sinners and Preparation of catechumens for baptism. Easter was the primary time when converts were baptized, so they underwent a period of intense instruction and discipline.
Where? Alexandria and Rome, Jerusalem and Antioch
When? Nicaea (325 CE): The key turning point. Not Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.
Canon 5 of the Council of Nicaea references a tessarakonte (a “forty-day” period), which many scholars take as the first institutional acknowledgment of something Lent-like — though its exact form is debated.
Council of Nicaea unified the Christian calendar and reinforced the centrality of Easter.
Remember, the Council was called by Emperor Constantine and so was government-sanctioned.
Nicaea’s Easter dating decision was a necessary precondition, but the 40-day fast grew up around it organically rather than being legislated into existence. Liturgical scholars say that the forty-day Lent became widespread shortly after.
Critical scholarship identifies Alexandria and Rome as the primary incubators of Lenten structure, with significant parallel development in Jerusalem and Antioch. Jerusalem is particularly important because the rise of Christian pilgrimage in the 4th century (accelerated by Constantine’s patronage) meant Holy Week liturgies there became highly elaborated and influential.
4th century: Lent solidifies. About 10 years after Nicaea, Athanasius’s Festal Letters (c. 330s), which explicitly instructed Egyptian churches to observe a 40-day fast. He also told them to only study the 27 books we now say are the NT.
What Role Did Baptism Play?
According to most historians of early Christianity, Easter baptism was increasingly encouraged and preferred beginning in the 3rd century and became widespread in the 4th century.
The preparation of candidates for baptism at Easter is widely regarded as one of the main reasons for the forty-day Lenten season.
Springtime conditions may have made immersion Easter baptisms practical, especially when immersion occurred in natural or unheated water.
How cold are winters in the Levant and Rome related to Mobile?
- In general, temperatures are related to how far one is from the equator.
- Jerusalem is between Mobile and Montgomery.
- Jerusalem would be about 75 miles north of Mobile and Nazareth would be 145 miles.
- The climates of the Levant and south Alabama share a somewhat similar sun angle and day-length pattern, though humidity and rainfall are very different.
What does that tell me??
That is why Mobile is known as God’s Country.
Temps In the Levant
- Winter (Dec–Feb):
- lows about 41–50 °F in many populated areas.
- highs about 54–64 °F in hill and coastal regions, warmer (high teens/low 20s °C) in the Jordan Valley and around the Dead Sea.
- Spring (Mar–May):
- Lows roughly 50–64 °F.
- Highs roughly 68–82 °F with increasing dryness and sunshine.
Temps In Rome
- Winter (Dec–Feb)
- Lows: about 37–43 °F.
- Highs: about 52–57 °F.
