An Introduction to Lent

The history of Lent reveals traditions rich with meaning. Lent deepened the experience of early Christian community as new believers were baptized and as the events of Christ’s death and resurrection were celebrated.
In the liturgical rites of most churches, there is a pastoral exhortation to the people at the beginning of the Ash Wednesday liturgy that expresses well the focus of Lent. One such elocution is the following from the Book of Common Prayer (1979) of the Episcopal Church:
Dear People of God: The first Christians observed with great devotion the days of our Lord’s passion and resurrection, and it became the custom of the Church to prepare for them by a season of penitence and fasting. This season of Lent provided a time in which converts to the faith were prepared for Holy Baptism. It was also a time for those who, because of notorious sins, had been separated from the body of the faithful and were reconciled by penitence and forgiveness, and restored to the fellowship of the church. Thereby, the whole congregation was put in mind of the message of pardon and absolution set forth in the Gospel of our Savior, and of the need which all Christians continually have to renew their repentance and faith. I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word. And, to make a right beginning of repentance, and as a mark of our mortal nature, let us now kneel before the Lord, our maker and redeemer.
The current experience of Lent in many churches begins with the Ash Wednesday liturgy that often includes the imposition of ashes as a sign of our mortality, and moves slowly and methodically through five weeks of preparation coming to a climax in the liturgy for Palm Sunday. The blessing and procession of palms, the singing of the great Hosanna, and the Gospel proclamation of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, combine to create a brief festal interlude in the discipline of Lent. This same rite, however, intensifies our focus upon the sufferings and death of our Lord in the days of Holy Week. Toward the end of our paschal fast, we experience the quiet tragedy of the acts of Friday, the solitude of the Great Sabbath, the quiet joy of the Paschal Vigil, and the blasting ecstasy of the first Eucharist of Easter. It should come as no surprise that this progression of our Lent-to-Easter season, with due allowance for details, is the reverse of the actual pattern of development. The early Christians placed the resurrection of the Lord at the very center of their religious observance.
The Passover was deeply ingrained in the lives and traditions of the early Jewish-Christian community. Such a significant event in the life of a community of faith is not easily dismissed, even in the face of another event of redemptive significance. While the resurrection of our Lord had immediate and far-reaching impact upon the Jewish-Christian community, there is no reason to assume that it immediately supplanted the annual observance of Passover. The great and mighty act accomplished by God in the death and resurrection of Jesus in no way detracted from the earlier act of God that brought their ancestors out of bondage into freedom. Indeed, the blending of the two traditions in the Jewish-Christian community added richness to the meaning of both.
The celebration of the Passover in customary fashion was preceded in some places by fasting on the day of preparation for the Passover, the day, according to the chronology of John’s gospel, that Jesus was crucified. The rich content of Passover was certainly in the mind of Paul when he wrote, “Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us celebrate the festival” (1 Cor. 5:7–8). The early Christian communities of Jewish background did not quickly or easily give up the annual Passover observance. As late as the end of the second century, the paschal controversy was being waged with vigor. The controversy was centered on a dispute between the Christians in Asia and those in Rome (and the other major Western centers of the church) over the date of Easter. The Asians, led in their position by Polycarp of Smyrna and Polycrates of Ephesus, pleaded for an annual celebration of Pascha on the fourteenth day of Nisan, the anniversary of the Crucifixion, regardless of the day of the week upon which it would fall. Rome, as the center of the Western churches, led by Anicetus and Victor I, supported the view that Easter should always fall on the Sunday next after the fourteenth of Nisan. Each side of the controversy claimed to be preserving the practice and understanding of the apostles, but it is worthy to point out that each group appealed to different apostles. In the fourth century, the Council of Nicea settled the issue, declaring that Easter would be celebrated on the Sunday after the first full moon of spring. That declaration, while making it impossible for Christians to celebrate Easter on the same day as the Jewish community would celebrate Passover, in no way succeeded in eliminating from the Christian celebration the rich imagery of Passover.
It is not unreasonable to assume, then, that in the earliest years the Christian community celebrated the unitive commemoration of the death and Resurrection on one day. The power and impact of that salvific event, however, could not be contained in one day. By the fourth century, the annual commemoration took on a more programmatic, historically oriented nature. The one day was expanded into three holy days, the paschal triduum. The original triduum was, as the word suggests, three days: Friday, a remembrance of the Crucifixion; Saturday, a sabbath of rest in commemoration of the Lord’s rest in the grave; and Sunday, the festal celebration of Resurrection.
The practice of the earliest years of the church varied widely. In some places, due to the understanding that the liturgical day began at sundown of the previous calenderical day, the Eucharist of Holy Thursday was soon considered part of the paschal triduum. In other locales, the Eucharist was celebrated several times on Holy Thursday, while in Rome the day took the reconciliation of penitents as its content and did not include Eucharist as a regular part of its liturgical observance until the seventh century.
The expansion of the paschal fast behind the “three holy days” can be noted in the third-century document Didascalia Apostolorum. Here we find that the fast has been extended to a full week with provisions for water, bread, and salt for the first four days. The expansion of the one-week fast into the six-week fast has normally been explained by the suggestion that it was to parallel the expansion of the one-day fast into the six-day fast. While there is some evidence of truth to that, it is not universally that simple. The notable exception to this pattern is the Byzantine tradition, which keeps its Lenten fast for six weeks before Holy Week, making seven in all. At the end of the liturgy of the six weeks is sung: “Now that we have fulfilled the forty-day Lent which is profitable to our souls, we beseech Thee to behold the Holy Week of Thy Passion.” It is clear from this that the “keeping of the fast” did not have identical dimensions in every place.
What does appear to be constant was the desire that the Lenten fast be forty days. The number of weeks before Pascha varied depending upon whether Holy Week was included and upon the number of days in a week that were reckoned to be fast days. Sunday, for example, was not a fast day because it is always the Lord’s Day, the day of resurrection. In some places, Saturday was also not a fast day, except for the fast of Holy Saturday. The reason for the desirability of a forty-day fast is scriptural: Moses, Elijah, and particularly Jesus fasted for periods of forty days. This tradition continues to be preserved today in the pericopes for the first Sunday in Lent. In all three lectionary years, the gospel reading is a synoptic account of Jesus’ forty-day fast and temptation in the wilderness.
The character of Lent is twofold. The forty days give us the opportunity to make preparation for the celebration of the major event of the liturgical year and for the central event of our lives: the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. At the same time, Lent has an integrity all its own. It can be argued, of course, that everything the Christian is or does should be approached in light of the paschal event. While this may be true, the searching examination of one’s life, one’s prayerful “in-reach” and one’s struggling with the demands of discipleship need not always be focused toward “getting ready” for Easter. Christ is risen and the power of his Risen Spirit will make himself known to us whether or not we are prepared. The powerful promise of resurrection is not dependent upon our readiness to receive. We can keep Lent for its own sake. We are freed to interact with God and with each other for spiritual examination and growth in our daily pilgrimage in life, not just in our annual pilgrimage to the cross.
Many churches are finding new meaning in the keeping of Lent. Even those churches that are historically nonliturgical in their orientation are finding that a renewed sense of the Lenten journey in preparation for the great celebration of Easter is a welcome enrichment to the late winter/early spring months. In planning for Lent, it is well to consider any number of possibilities give intensity to the meaning of this liturgical season. The traditional Shrove Tuesday celebration, carried on in some congregations by a pancake supper and in others by their own version of the Mardi Gras, commends itself as a final opportunity for celebratory fun and feasting as the people of God before solitude is imposed on Ash Wednesday. Congregations that are unable to gather for festivities on Tuesday might consider a “farewell to Alleluia” as part of the liturgy for the last Sunday after the Epiphany or a Sunday night parish activity built on a Shrove Tuesday theme.
The arrival of Ash Wednesday should be blatantly noticeable. The entire church facility should reflect the nature of Lent. Visually, a drastic change should be apparent in the worship space. The imposition of ashes is a vivid reminder of our personal and corporate need for God. Clergy and other worship leaders insecure about introducing what appears to be a conflict between the imposition of ashes and the Gospel for the day might look upon that struggle positively. There are few liturgical assemblies in the year at which the real crux of discipleship can be so powerfully addressed.
The Sundays in Lent present the next problem and opportunity. Noting that the Sundays are in Lent and not of Lent, the question must be raised concerning how they should be handled liturgically. One could, no doubt, argue that since every Sunday is the Lord’s Day, the weekly Sunday gathering for Word and Sacrament should proceed ahead unimpeded, celebrated as usual, in all its fullness. There is much that commends this position. But such a stance is not wise because it does not take into account the needs of the people to express liturgically their Lenten disciplines. If every congregation had a full cycle of daily prayer and other liturgical expressions during the weekdays of Lent, then the normal eucharistic liturgy would be fine. But given the fact that for the most part such conditions do not exist, the major time the people gather for worship is still Sunday morning. Therefore, Sundays in Lent should reflect that reality. Trimming down the liturgy, cutting back on the flamboyance of the music, even changing the style of the preaching can aid in making the Sunday liturgy reflective of the more ascetical focus of Lent.
On Ash Wednesday we are invited to begin our journey toward Easter and to live disciplined paschal life. Thomas J. Talley has written,
To do this is to enter for the time upon a different sense of who I am, a more profound sense of who I am, achieved by disengagement from preoccupation with the structure which normally defines me. It is a matter of rediscovering ourselves by forgetting who we are and this forgetting, this turning in a new direction, is metanoia, conversion, repentance. Repentance is not preoccupation with an unsavory past, but the very opposite of that. It is the positive embrace of our helplessness as a moment of transcendent truth. It is the exciting discovery of humility, of poverty, of nakedness, and of the utter seriousness of our life in God.

Neil Alexander

Webber, Robert: The Services of the Christian Year. Nashville : Star Song Pub. Group, 1994, S. 225