Ash Wednesday
Today, is Ash Wednesday, the dies cinerum, which marks the beginning of Lent in the Catholic Church.
Lent is the forty day period preceeding Easter, the Quadragesima, which is calculated to extend from Easter Sunday back for forty days, not including Sundays. Sundays are not included because they commemorate Christ’s resurrection. Why forty days? The forty days commemorate the significant “forty” periods in Scripture, including:
- The forty years the Jews wandered in the desert after they had been rescued by God from Egypt;
- Jonah preached to Nineveh that God’s judgment would come on them in forty days. During that time the people repented and thus were spared God’s judgment; and
- Jesus was tested by the Devil in the desert for forty days before He began His public ministry.
It is not an accident that these “forty” periods were times of prayer and repentence Lent is that time for Christians, during which they remember their sinfulness, fast, and do acts of penance as a recognition that God’s forgiveness came at the price of the death of His son Jesus Christ. It is our “forty” period. During this time, we are reminded that sin separates us from God. One doesn’t usually desire to be separate from the person one loves.
How did we come to receive the ashes? Ashes are a sign of mourning and repentence in Scripture, including the following passages:
- Jeremiah calls for repentence, "O daughter of my people, gird on sackcloth, roll in the ashes." (Jeremiah 6:26)
- After Absalom’s sister Tamar had been raped, she tore her tunic and put ashes on her head in her grief. "Tamar put ashes on her head and tore the long tunic in which she was clothed. Then putting her hands to her head, she went away crying loudly." (2 Sam. 13:19)
- When Joseph’s 11 brother’s told Jacob that he had been devoured by beasts, Jacob went into mourning and put on sackcloth and ashes. (Genesis 37:34)
- Daniel pleaded for God to rescue Israel with sackcloth and ashes as a sign of Israel’s repentance. "I turned to the Lord God, pleading in earnest prayer, with fasting, sackcloth and ashes." (Daniel 9:3)
- When Jonah told the Ninevites to repent: "When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, laid aside his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in the ashes." (Jonah 3:6).
- Judith 4:11 "And all the Israelite men, women and children who lived in Jerusalem prostrated themselves in front of the temple building, with ashes strewn on their heads, displaying their sackcloth covering before the Lord." (See also 4:15 and 9:1).
- The Maccabees, Jewish rebels fighting for independence just prior to the New Testament period, prepared for battle using ashes. "That day they fasted and wore sackcloth; they sprinkled ashes on their heads and tore their clothes." (I Maccabees 3:47; see also 4:39).
- In the New Testament, Jesus also refers to the use of sackcloth and ashes as signs of repentance: "Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty deeds done in your midst had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would long ago have repented in sackcloth and ashes." (Mt 11:21, Lk 10:13).
The history of Ash Wednesday is a bit obscure:
Despite all these references in Scripture, the use of ashes in the Church left only a few records in the first millennium of Church history. Thomas Talley, an expert on the history of the liturgical year, says that the first clearly datable liturgy for Ash Wednesday that provides for sprinkling ashes is in the Romano-Germanic pontifical of 960. Before that time, ashes had been used as a sign of admission to the Order of Penitents. As early as the sixth century, the Spanish Mozarabic rite calls for signing the forehead with ashes when admitting a gravely ill person to the Order of Penitents. At the beginning of the 11th century, Abbot Aelfric notes that it was customary for all the faithful to take part in a ceremony on the Wednesday before Lent that included the imposition of ashes. Near the end of that century, Pope Urban II called for the general use of ashes on that day. Only later did this day come to be called Ash Wednesday. 1
The Order of Penitents consisted of people who had committed a serious sin within the Christian community and who needed to repair their relationship with God before coming back to the Eucharist. During Lent, the penitents would repent for their sins and gain a fresh conversion. At the same time, the Order of the Catechumens, new converts to the faith, would be learning their catechism in preparation for the sacraments of baptism and confirmation. Like the catechumens who were preparing for Baptism, the penitents were often dismissed from the Sunday assembly after the Liturgy of the Word. The early church fathers saw serious sin after baptism as a sign that a person’s conversion was not complete, therefore penance was a second chance at a complete conversion. In this way, penance and baptism are essentially linked.
Lent developed in the Church as the whole community prayed and fasted for the catechumens who were preparing for Baptism. At the same time, those members of the community who were already baptized prepared to renew their baptismal promises at Easter, thus joining the catechumens in seeking to deepen their own conversion. It was natural, then, that the Order of Penitents also focused on Lent, with reconciliation often being celebrated on Holy Thursday so that the newly reconciled could share in the liturgies of the Triduum. With Lent clearly a season focused on Baptism, Penance found a home there as well. 1
Over time, we lost the Order of the Catechumens, and the emphasis shifted solely to penance even after the Order of Penitents was lost too. It wasn’t until Vatican II that the Order of Catechumens was resurrected and with it, much of the underlying meaning of Lent which connects penance to baptism.
For penance isn’t just about being wrong. It’s about a true metanoia – the Greek word for "repent" which is so much more aptly descriptive than the Latin. When I think of the word "repent" what often comes to mind is strange men on sidewalks wearing poster boards with apocalyptic messages, usually with "repent" written in big letters. But that’s not really what it’s about. Metanoia comes from two Greek words: "meta", meaning "change", and "noia" meaning "mind". Not in the sense that you change your mind about what you’re going to wear today. Metanoia is really about a change of innermost attitude. It’s about a conversion – a reversion, if you will – to our relationship with God. This is something that we, as Christians, are called to work on every day. And this is why when the ashes are placed upon our forehead, the priest says, "Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospels."
