Ash Wednesday
the beginning of Lent
February 17 (Ash Wednesday) is the day that begins the period of Lent, i.e., the forty-day penance in the Catholic Church. This celebration is to inspire Catholics to take a decisive path of personal renewal and conversion.
On Ash Wednesday, Catholics begin a forty-day Lent Time. The number 40 in the Scriptures is an expression of a longer time, the time devoted to a specific task of man or God's saving action. In Lent, the Church reads and experiences not only the forty days Jesus spent in the desert praying and fasting before the beginning of His public ministry, but also three other great biblical events: forty days of a universal flood, after which God made a covenant with Noah; forty years of Israel's pilgrimage in the wilderness to the promised land; Moses spent forty days on Mount Sinai, where he received the Tablets of the Law from Jehovah
Periods and days of penance are a special time in the Catholic Church for spiritual exercises, penitential liturgy, penitential pilgrimages, voluntary sacrifices such as fasting and almsgiving, fraternal sharing with others, e.g., by initiating charitable and missionary works. The joyful "Alleluia" and "Glory to God" disappear from the liturgy, and the color of liturgical vestments becomes purple. The essence is to prepare the community of the faithful for the greatest Christian holiday, which is Easter.
Lent is also the period of preparation of catechumens for baptism. Each Sunday introduced us to the next mysteries of faith, and baptism itself is celebrated during the Easter Vigil. In the first centuries of Christianity, preparation for the feasts of the Resurrection took only forty hours. Later, the preparations took a whole week, and finally around the 5th century this time was extended. For the first time, the forty-day fast was mentioned by St. Athanasius of Alexandria in the pastoral letter for Easter of 334.
The traditional rite of sprinkling heads with ashes on Ash Wednesday is accompanied by the words: "Remember that you are dust, and you will turn to dust" or "Convert and believe in the Gospel". The very custom of sprinkling ashes on heads as a sign of mourning and penance is known in many cultures and traditions. We find it in ancient Egypt and Greece, as well as in Indian tribes, and of course in the pages of the Bible. For instance, in the Book of Esther, Mordecai put on sackcloth and ashes when he heard of the decree of King Ahasuerus (or Xerxes, 485-464 B.C.) of Persia to kill all the Jewish people in the Persian Empire (Esther 4:1). Job (whose story was written between the 7th and 5th centuries B.C.) repented in sackcloth and ashes (Job 42:6). Prophesying the Babylonian captivity of Jerusalem, Daniel (c. 550 B.C.) wrote, “I turned to the Lord God, to seek help, in prayer and petition, with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes.” (Daniel 9:3). In the 5th century B.C., after Jonah’s preaching of conversion and repentance, the town of Nineveh proclaimed a fast and put-on sackcloth, and the king covered himself with sackcloth and sat in the ashes (Jonah 3:5-6). These Old Testament examples evidence both a recognized practice of using ashes and a common understanding of their symbolism.Jesus Himself also made reference to ashes: Referring to towns that refused to repent of sin although they had witnessed the miracles and heard the gospel, our Lord said, “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” (Matthew 11:21).
The liturgical adaptation of this custom, however, appears only in the 8th century. The first testimonies about the blessing of ashes come from the 10th century. In the next century, Pope Urban II introduced this custom as binding throughout the Church. It is also from this time that the ashes for sprinkling the heads of the faithful came from palms consecrated on Palm Sunday of the previous year.
Lent is a period of special call to reconciliation with God. During this period, we should also rebuild our attitude in order to protect what is right and what is right for God's sake, whether people like it or not. During this period, we should also examine ourselves to see if we have any ideas about the good that go against God's commandments.
Today, at the very beginning of Lent, we are reading the Gospel which teaches us about the special importance of three areas of our religious activity, i.e., fasting prayer and alms giving.
It is precisely on the basis of today's Gospel that the Fathers of the Church liked to show the triune of these three ways of worshiping God. They said this: a prayer is a bird which, in order to fly to heaven, must have two wings - the wings of fasting and deeds of mercy. They said the same about fasting: that it is such a bird that will not fly anywhere if it lacks the wings of prayer and wings of works of mercy. And the Church Fathers said the same about the works of mercy, that this bird needs a wing of prayer and a wing of fasting.
The most important thing is that during this Lent we try to implement - as we can - this trinity of prayer, fasting and works of mercy.
Until Tomorrow
fr. george