Some of you may have noticed during the past week: Lent is controversial. It is controversial partly because Christians have long abused it, partly because some see Lent as a symbolic boundary between Protestant and Catholic.

Most of the Reformers retained Lent, but gave it a dramatically new form.

Instead of focusing on fasting and deprivation, they made it an occasion to concentrate on Jesus’ sufferings and death. Lent is not about earning favor by self-affliction; it’s about deepening our experience of God’s free grace in the cross.

Do we need this? There’s nothing we need more. The cross means everything to us. The cross stretches to encompass the four corners of the world. We could spend a millennium of Lents and only scratch the surface. It has infinite depth because it is the supreme revelation of the infinite God. We spend time on the cross because we worship a cruciform God.

Just as we celebrate Easter to remind ourselves that we share already in resurrection life, so we observe Lent so that our lives may be more and more conformed to the cross of Jesus, so that we learn to make the cross our only boast.