Special Ash Wednesday Blog!

Today, in addition to being Valentine's Day, is Ash Wednesday. This day commences Lent and follows Fat Tuesday. (I feel right at home on Fat Tuesday.) Lent leads us right up to Easter, which is the culmination of our Lord's life. It should be the holiest day of the year, but traditions of candy, eggs and ham for dinner intrude on what should be a sacred day. (Really? Jesus was a true Jew. If He had eaten pork, they would have killed Him for that. So, to celebrate His death, burial and Resurrection, we eat pork?)

When I was growing up, we observed the secular parts of Lent and Easter. Easter was all about Easter baskets and egg hunts and ham for dinner. When I was little, we attended a church and on Easter my sisters got new dresses. I had to wear a tie, which I hated. But that only lasted about three years. Interestingly enough, I do not remember being told of the Resurrection of our Lord until I was a senior in high school. Easter, in our home, was never about that.  

After I had accepted Christ as Savior, I became interested in the details of our little traditions. It was becoming more and more clear to me that the Resurrection and Easter eggs came from two different sources. As I began to study these traditions, it became apparent that the Bible story all by itself was moving and powerful and all the traditions originated from the Catholic church. That seemed inexplicable, so I dug farther.

I have talked of this before, so this will be short. (hahahahahaha) The Roman Empire, from emperor Constantine onward, would defeat a country and then force them to accept Christianity. However, if you discarded the traditions of those countries, the people would rise up in attempted insurrection. It was easier to allow them to keep their traditions but change the wording a little. Ash Wednesday came from such tradition. A particular country honored the local god of fire by sprinkling ashes on the heads of the people. The Roman Catholic church adopted this as a show of penance for their sin. In time it evolved from ashes dumped on the head to ashes on the forehead in the sign of the cross. The entire season of Lent evolved from a pagan system of worship. The church simply moved the 40 days of remembrance to a different 40 days on the calendar to coincide with Easter. Easter itself was a period of celebration in the Spring to honor Estre, the goddess of fertility. This worship of Estre included eggs and rabbits. The practice of giving something up for Lent in order to show God your seriousness, goes back to Pope Gregory (590 AD to 604 AD). The Council of Nicea proclaimed a period of prayer and fasting for 40 days before Easter. Gregory came along 250 years later and changed that a bit. He didn't like the fasting part of it, even though it was daylight fasting. (You fasted during the daylight hours and ate only after dark or before the sun came up.) He made the period 46 days before Easter and excluded Sundays. To this day, Sundays during Lent are not actually a part of Lent. Anyway, instead of fasting, it was decreed that you would just have to eliminate something during Lent to satisfy the church. It was for a long while the absence of meat (except on Sundays, which were not part of Lent), and then it became meatless Fridays and you gave up something else. (Meatless Fridays is where eating fish on Friday originated because fish was not considered real meat. I love a good Friday fish fry, but it has nothing to do with tradition.) Once people began giving up something else to satisfy the Lord, (usually some form of alcohol) the concept of Fat Tuesday took hold, the day before the start of Lent, and was a day of guiltless indulgence. 

I went to get a cup of coffee on Tuesday morning at the coffee bar in my building. Along with coffee, there were several boxes of paczky. For those of you not familiar with Polish traditions, paczky is like a creme filled donut, only it is filled with fruit. Not bad, really. They were giving them away in honor of Fat Tuesday. One final indulgence. "So, what are you giving up for Lent?" "Me? Not a thing." "What? You are a minister and you are not giving something up for Lent? Are you retired from being religious?" "Never was religious. Just a believer of Scripture over traditions. But I will take a paczky, since they're free." 

John 19:28-30---28 After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.” 29 A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to His mouth. 30 When Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, “It is finished,” and He bowed His head and gave up His spirit.  

Do we really need to embellish the greatest act of compassion and grace that ever happened? We tend to cringe at extreme cruelty, so I have always given the Roman Catholic church the benefit of the doubt and have said they were just taking the edge off the horror of that day. But maybe we should be fully aware of what Jesus went through for each of us. Chocolate rabbits and candy filled eggs were not there. The people who witnessed the death of Jesus did not go home to a fine ham. No one breathed a sigh of relief because their six weeks of refusing some pleasure was over. Instead, there were mocking crowds, beatings, gambling soldiers and those who relished torturing Him as He died on the cross. There was a grieving mother watching her Son die the most horrible death possible, a frightened disciple who, despite his fear, stood next to that grieving mother and accepted her as his own, others who had believed His message, now watching as hope seemed to die before them. And there was the God-man, One who had never sinned in word or deed, realizing even in the fog of pain, that all was fulfilled, muttered the words, "It is finished."

Then true name of the day is Resurrection Day, not Easter. Grow in Spirit and in grace and in power, so that when Resurrection finally arrives, you can truly thank Him for finishing the greatest of all gifts.

Blessings.