Lent is, among other things, the time of the Jews - it's the last forty days of the Old Testament.
The Zero Hour of Jewish history is getting nearer and nearer. It’s going to arrive with an extraordinary teacher riding on donkey-back into Jerusalem (the old Jerusalem yet). In reaction to him, the nation is going to be validated – or not.
It's going to happen on one particular day, a day for which the nation was created, for which Abraham was asked to trust and go to a foreign land, for which the Red Sea parted, for which the Jordan was crossed and for which the way back from Babylon was made. Now that they are back, the big test of the most strategic of the nation's alliances is coming up.
On the crucial level, the challenge is for each Jew individually, just as centuries later it is for each of us, individually. In the process, every thought and every feeling, every word and every gesture, every omission and every hesitation are going to count (but, as we'll see soon, one spontaneous plea may outweigh scores of premeditated crimes). Everyting is going to be carefully looked at when emotions calm down and the time comes to assess it all – which is not yet. And the results, as we know, are going to be handed out individually, too.
But there’s no escaping the fact that the day - the penultimate day of Lent - is also an ultimate showdown time for the Jewish nation.
The accumulated lessons of the Patriarchs, the Torah, the Prophets and the Singer-Psalm Writers, so carefully preserved and taught for centuries, are to come to fruition now - or to withering.
Soon, on behalf of the nation its establishment is going to make a judgment and give a collective reply to a question sent by the greatest ally of the Jews; and it's basically a question of trust.
The day, the question and the answer had been foretold by the nation’s prophets, their prophecies came true and the rest is history now (although some claim it's an on-going history), but doesn’t it feel each year as if everything was unfolding all over again right in front of our eyes, in real time?
And as Lent’s excruciating climax approaches, don’t we feel - because we are all through the Jews, aren't we? - as if our own nation’s fate was at stake on that day?
And don’t we find ourselves standing shoulder to shoulder with those elder brothers of ours outside Pilate’s palace, praying that what we witness coluld be just one big anti-Semitic calumny?
