The episodes included in the York Cycle from Christ's adult life after his Baptism complete the bridging of the narrative gap between Christmas and Easter. All are drawn from the liturgy for Lent itself, with an increasing concentration at the beginning and at the end. The beginning of the Lenten season is marked in the Missal by the account of Christ's forty-day Temptation in the Wilderness (Matthew 4: 1–11). The Gospel text is accompanied by an Epistle reading from 2 Corinthians 6: 1–10, on the need to demonstrate steadfastness in adversity. The two combined signal the origin of the Lenten fast as a formal opportunity for imitating Christ's own self-imposed period of deprivation. The believer was aware that Christ used this period as a preparation for his mission on earth and eventual death, Resurrection, and return to heaven. The Epistle text braced the individual Christian for the Church's period of fasting and withdrawal in preparation for his or her mystical emulation of that integration at annual communion.

The first weekday Gospel text following this is Matthew 25: 31–46, which is the account of the Last Judgement. In the York Cycle, of course, historical order is rectified, and Doomsday is the subject for the final pageant (Mercers, XLVII), but the proximity of the two texts in the calendar, Temptation and Judgement, may explain the link between the two which literary critics have found in the cycle.