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Strains of “Lord, Who Throughout These Forty Days” echo through many parishes during Lent as a summons to imitate Jesus in fasting and prayer. But too much emphasis on the penitential dimension of the six weeks of Lent can obscure the fact that the seven weeks of Easter also shape the liturgical season. Like ripples from a stone cast into a pond, Lent grew from the Easter celebration of the paschal mystery, backward to the six weeks of preparation and forward to the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost.

One of the most innovative restorations of the liturgy after the Second Vatican Council was to place the three great readings from the Gospel of John (about the Samaritan woman at the well, the man born blind and the raising of Lazarus) into the Lenten Sunday readings of Cycle A, and in the other cycles when there are people in the community preparing to be baptized during the coming Easter vigil. Originally part of the scrutinies (examinations) of baptismal candidates and read only on select weekdays in Lent, they now guide the whole people of God to a renewed appropriation of Christ’s saving gifts and the continuing presence of the Spirit. They preview those key insights of the Gospel of John that will resonate from Easter to Pentecost.

On the first two Sundays of Lent, the Gospels tell of the testing of Jesus in the desert and the Transfiguration, summarizing the meaning of the Lent-Easter season. The readings focus on a message contained in one of the oldest Christian hymns (Phil 2:5-11), which heralds Christ Jesus who, though “in the form of God took on the form of a slave” and suffered the ultimate human test, death on the cross, only to be exalted and given a name above every other name. In the three weeks that follow, the Gospel readings from John use symbol and story to guide the church to the threshold of Easter.

Origen called John “the spiritual Gospel,” and the theologian John S. Dunne has described the fourth Gospel as “the essence of Christianity” and “a reading glass for reading all else.” In this narrative of the “Word made flesh,” Jesus speaks as one “from above” and most often in the allusive and rich language of symbol and story. Taking a cue from Paul Ricoeur’s famous dictum that “symbol gives rise to thought,” I offer some thoughts on the symbolism of these three great Lenten Gospel readings, which guide us along our way to discipleship and lead to abundant life with God.

“Symbol” and “symbolic” are two of the most evocative and widely defined terms in any language. As Craig Koester has written in This article appears in February 4 2008.