Friday After Ash Wednesday

THIS FAST OF FORTY DAYS
From a sermon by St Maximus the Confessor 6
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We must accept with all reverence…the sacred days of Lent, and not recoil
because of the length of the season; for the longer the days of our fasting, the
greater the grounds of our forgiveness; the longer the time of our self-denial,
the greater the price paid for our soul’s salvation; the severer the treatment of
our wounds, the more sure the healing of our offences. For God who is the
Physician of our souls has instituted an appropriate time; sufficient for the just
to make reparation and for sinners to ask for mercy; the one praying for peace,
the other imploring pardon.
For the days of Lent are suited to our purposes; not short, so that we may
plead in prayer; not long, for our need to gain merit. For in this fast of forty days
any offence may be wiped out, and the severity of any judge softened. The time
may be long and tedious for the one neither pleads for his sins, nor hopes for
forgiveness. For he who despairs will neither confess his sins, nor hope in the
mercy of the Judge.

Holy and salutary therefore is the time of Lent, in which the Judge is
moved to mercy, the sinner to repentance, and the just to peace. For in these
days the Divinity is inclined to be more merciful, the sinner to repent, and grace
to be obtained. All things are now prepared: the heavens to pardon, the sinner
to confess, the tongue to plead.

Mystical and salutary is this number forty. For when in the beginning the
iniquity of mortals covered the earth, God, dissolving the clouds of heaven for

the space of this number of days, covered the whole earth with a flood. You see
then already that in this time the Mystery is put before us in Figure. For as it
then rained for forty days, to cleanse the world, so now it also happens. Yet the
deluge of those days must be called a mercy; in that through it iniquity was
crushed, and justice upheld. For it took place out of mercy, to deliver the just,
and that the wicked might no longer sin. We see clearly it was through mercy it
came, as a sort of baptism, in which the face of the earth was renewed; that is,
so that mortals who wallowed in the dreadful sin of those abandoned might
come to grace in the dwelling of Noah, and so that he who was then an abode of
iniquity, might become a dwelling of holiness.

Holy and dedicated is this time of forty days, which immediately from the
beginning began to divide the just from the unjust; and by a kind of judgment
separate the good from the bad. And this takes place even in our time of forty
days. For in these forty days the good are divided from the bad, that is, the
chaste from the unchaste, the temperate from the intemperate, the Christian
from the heathen. The wicked, as I say, are separated from the good, that is, the
sinner from the just, the devil from the saint, the heretic from the faithful. For
those others are lost, as in the Flood, in the disaster of this world, while the
Church alone, with all its virtues, is like the Ark sustained above the deep.

6 The Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers, vol. 2, Henry Regnery Co. Chicago, 1958, pg 92.