Commontide
Paschal Cycle
Moveable feast
Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent. It falls on the Wednesday forty-six days before Easter, and so moves with Easter each year, between early February and early March. Lent is a fast of forty days, but the church does not fast on Sundays, each a feast of the Resurrection; the forty are counted apart from the six Sundays of the season, and the four days from Ash Wednesday to the following Saturday complete the number. The day commemorates no event. It begins a season of penitence, fasting, and prayer in preparation for Easter. The Book of Common Prayer (2019) keeps it as Ash Wednesday with a liturgy of its own: an exhortation to a holy Lent, Psalm 51, a Litany of Penitence, and, where ashes are to be imposed, the marking of each worshipper with ashes and with words from Genesis 3:19, God's sentence on Adam after the fall. The Byzantine churches begin their fast on a Monday, without ashes.
Ash Wednesday commemorates no event; it marks a beginning, and its ground in Scripture is teaching rather than narrative. The words said over the worshipper at the imposition of ashes come from Genesis 3:19, God's sentence on Adam after the fall. The prophets supply the call to return: Joel summons the people to return to the Lord with fasting and tells them to "rend your hearts and not your garments" (Joel 2:13, ESV). Christ's teaching on fasting in secret, from the Sermon on the Mount, is the day's Gospel. The forty days of his fast in the wilderness stand behind the length of the season, not behind this day.
Ashes were a sign of repentance long before there was an Ash Wednesday. Tertullian, describing the discipline of the penitent, says in Thelwall's translation that "it commands (the penitent) to lie in sackcloth and ashes, to cover his body in mourning". He describes a discipline, not a day. Later the sign belonged to a particular group: those enrolled in the order of penitents for grave and public sin, who were put out of the church at the beginning of Lent and reconciled on Maundy Thursday. For the ordinary worshipper the day was a sentence passed on somebody else. That public order was already dying when the Fourth Lateran Council, in 1215, made annual private confession the norm for all, but the day kept the vocabulary of public penance after the practice had gone, and the Exhortation of the Book of Common Prayer (2019) still recalls it.
Lent is older than its first day. The fifth canon of the Council of Nicaea, in 325, setting the times for provincial synods, places one of them before Lent, so the season was already a fixed point in the year. A fast of forty days is attested in the Festal Letters of Athanasius in the 330s (the Catholic Encyclopedia dates the relevant letters to 331 and 339). At Rome, Lent ran for six weeks, from the first Sunday of Lent to Holy Saturday; with the six Sundays set aside, that left thirty-six days of fasting, and Gregory the Great, in his sixteenth homily on the Gospels, counts exactly thirty-six and explains them as a tithe of the year. Between Gregory's death in 604 and about the year 700, four days were set before the first Sunday to make a full forty. The first witness to a fast beginning on the Wednesday is the Old Gelasian Sacramentary of about 700, which, in Wilson's edition as transcribed by Roger Pearse, opens the fast on the feria iv. From the eighteenth century the change was often credited to Gregory himself, an attribution traced to Alban Butler in 1774; Gregory's homily claims no change.
The Book of Common Prayer (2019) appoints the same readings for Ash Wednesday in every year: Joel 2:1-2, 12-17 or Isaiah 58:1-12; Psalm 103 or Psalm 103:8-14; 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10; and Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21.
Joel gives the day its summons. A trumpet is blown in Zion, a fast is proclaimed, and the people are told to return to the Lord with fasting, weeping, and mourning, and to "rend your hearts and not your garments" (Joel 2:13, ESV); the priests weep between the vestibule and the altar and ask the Lord to spare his people. Isaiah, the alternative, asks whether a fast is only bowing the head like a reed and spreading sackcloth and ashes, and answers, "Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness" (Isaiah 58:6, ESV), going on to name bread shared with the hungry and the homeless poor brought into the house. The day's own liturgy thus contains a caution against wearing ashes for show. Psalm 103 sings of the Lord's mercy toward those who are dust. In 2 Corinthians Paul appeals to his readers to be reconciled to God. In Matthew, Christ teaches that almsgiving, prayer, and fasting are to be done in secret, before the Father who sees in secret, and that treasure is to be laid up in heaven. The words spoken at the imposition of ashes, where ashes are imposed, come from Genesis 3:19, which is not appointed as a reading but stands behind the whole rite.
The core of this selection is old. Joel 2:12-17 with Matthew 6:16-21 is reported, on the authority of Massey Shepherd's Oxford American Prayer Book Commentary (1950), as the pairing shared by the Sarum and Roman missals, though the Sarum text itself has not been checked. The American book of 1928 kept that pair, with the Epistle from Joel 2:12 and the Gospel from Matthew 6:16. The modern set lengthens both readings, adds the passage from 2 Corinthians, and offers Isaiah 58 as an alternative; the Book of Common Prayer (2019) retains it from the American book of 1979. No account of the reasons for the expansion has been located.
The Book of Common Prayer (2019) gives Ash Wednesday a liturgy of its own. Its Exhortation, carried over essentially unchanged from the American book of 1979, recalls that the primitive church kept the days of the Lord's Passion and Resurrection with great devotion, and that this was a time when those separated from the faithful by notorious sin were reconciled to the fellowship of the church. It then issues the invitation, "I therefore invite you, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent", and names the means: self-examination and repentance, prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and reading and meditation upon God's Word. The collect of the day follows; the book prints it in both traditional and contemporary language.
If ashes are to be imposed, they are blessed with a prayer addressed to God as the one who made humankind from the dust of the earth: "Grant that these ashes may be unto us a symbol of our mortality and a sign of our penitence", so that those who receive them may remember that eternal life is received by grace alone. The ashes are then imposed with words from Genesis 3:19. Psalm 51 follows, in Coverdale's version, and then a Confession and Litany of Penitence in twelve petitions, in which the congregation confesses its sins "by what we have done, and by what we have left undone", its failure to love God with the whole heart and the neighbor as itself, and its failure to forgive. The Absolution follows, in one of two printed forms, asking that God "have mercy upon you, pardon and deliver you from all your sins".
The order of the service is its teaching. A worshipper who comes forward is told the plainest truth about the body, that it came from the earth and will return to it, and the rite does not soften it. But the truth is not told first, and it is not told alone. The invitation comes before the mark, and the prayer over the ashes calls them a sign of penitence and names grace as the only source of the life that outlasts the dust. The confession that follows is answered by absolution. Lent begins with that word, and the forty days it opens lead to Easter.
In the Roman rite the ashes are made by burning the palms blessed on the previous Palm Sunday, so that the same matter passes from one end of Lent to the other in the course of a year. They are blessed with four ancient prayers, sprinkled with holy water, and incensed before they are given. No one imposes ashes on himself; a bishop, and the pope, receive them from another. The gesture differs by region. In the English-speaking world a cross is traced on the forehead; in Italy, Poland, Spain, and much of Latin America the ashes are sprinkled over the crown of the head, the pope's included, where the sign is largely invisible.
Rome's station for the day is Santa Sabina on the Aventine, in the care of the Dominicans since the thirteenth century, one of only two stational liturgies the pope still keeps in person. In 1143 Benedict, a canon of St Peter's, described in Ordo Romanus XI a papal procession that went barefoot from St Anastasia to Santa Sabina, with the ashes given at the church where the procession gathered. The procession was dropped during the Avignon papacy and never restored; the station itself was revived by John XXIII in 1959. In the Sarum use of medieval England, according to a modern reference account rather than the Sarum books themselves, Ash Wednesday was not reckoned part of Lent: Lent began on the following Sunday, when the Lenten veils went up, and the celebrant at the blessing of the ashes wore a red cope rather than the white of Lent.
The day has its own music. The Introit Misereris omnium, the first of Lent, taken from Wisdom 11, speaks of God's mercy on all. Immutemur habitu is sung during the imposition; it is commonly traced to Joel 2:13, though chant scholarship derives it from a Holy Saturday responsory. Emendemus in melius, another chant of the day, was set in Latin by William Byrd, a recusant Catholic, in his Cantiones Sacrae of 1575, published under the royal printing patent he shared with Tallis and dedicated to Elizabeth I, in a church that had abolished the rite the text belongs to. Psalm 51 runs through the Sarum blessing of the ashes, the Commination, and the rite of 2019 alike.
Feasting belongs to the day before, Shrove Tuesday, the last day of Shrovetide. In Spain the Burial of the Sardine, a mock funeral procession ending in the burning or burial of an effigy, is still kept on Ash Wednesday; Goya painted it around 1812 to 1814. In the twenty-first century some clergy in the United States have given ashes on sidewalks and railway platforms as Ashes to Go, which its own account traces to an Episcopal priest in St Louis in 2007 (Episcopal News Service dates Episcopal participation to 2010); it has been defended as meeting people where they are and criticized as separating the sign from the worship that gives it meaning. The Eastern churches keep no Ash Wednesday. Byzantine Great Lent begins on Clean Monday, entered the evening before by Forgiveness Vespers, a service of mutual reconciliation rather than a mark set on the body, and its date can fall far from the Western one.
Primary sources. Ælfric's homily for the day, In Caput Ieiunii, is in W. W. Skeat's edition, Ælfric's Lives of Saints, volume I, Early English Text Society, Original Series 76 (1881), homily XII, pages 261 to 267, free at archive.org, with Skeat's facing translation; it is the earliest clear witness to ashes given to all the faithful, and the Old English is also at Wikisource. John Mirk's Festial, edited by T. Erbe, Early English Text Society, Extra Series 96 (1905), sermon 19, pages 82 to 84, at archive.org, shows how an English parish was taught to keep the day. Tertullian's treatise on repentance, in Thelwall's translation for the Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume 3, is at New Advent, for sackcloth and ashes as signs of penance before the day existed. Latimer's Sermon of the Plough and Lancelot Andrewes's Ash Wednesday sermons are at Project Canterbury, for the Reformation case against the ashes and the day's survival as a preaching occasion. The 1662 Commination, the 1928 American propers, and the 1979 American rite trace the day through the Prayer Book tradition; the Book of Common Prayer (2019) materials are published by the Anglican Church in North America (liturgy; propers). The Purchas judgment is quoted at page 19 of . Paul VI's (1966) is at vatican.va, for the modern Roman discipline of the fast.
The name came with the custom. The earliest surviving copies of the Gregorian Sacramentary call the day dies cinerum, the day of ashes, a usage that probably reaches back at least to the eighth century. Another Latin name, in capite jejunii, "at the head of the fast," attested in medieval manuscript titles and glossed in Old English by Ælfric, names the day by its place rather than its sign. The giving of ashes to the whole people, and not only to penitents, is first clearly attested in England. The Regularis Concordia, the English monastic customary of about 970, is reported to provide for the ashes to be given to monks. About the year 1000 Ælfric of Eynsham, in a homily on the beginning of the fast that was preached on the Sunday before, tells his hearers, in W. W. Skeat's edition and translation, that priests throughout the world bless clean ashes in church on the Wednesday and lay them on the people's heads, so that they may remember they came from earth and will return to dust. He treats the custom as established, explains the four added days by the same arithmetic, and enforces the discipline with cautionary tales: a man who refused the ashes, he relates, died within the week, run through on his own spear while hounds attacked him. The Synod of Benevento, under Pope Urban II in 1091, made the giving of ashes general for clergy and laity, men and women alike, nearly a century after Ælfric assumed the custom; the sources show the practice in several places independently, and no route by which it spread has been traced. In being given to everyone, the sign changed its meaning. Laid on penitents, the ashes had said that they were excluded; laid on the whole church, the bishop with the rest, they said that all are mortal.
In the later Middle Ages John Mirk's Festial, the most widely used collection of English sermons, told the laity to come to church on Ash Wednesday, take ashes at the priest's hand, and keep in their hearts the words he said over them, and it excused from the fast the young, women with child, the old, pilgrims, the sick, the poor, and those who labor hard for their living.
The English Reformation ended the rite. Henry VIII's Ten Articles, of 1536 or 1538 (the sources differ), still counted the giving of ashes among approved ceremonies, but in 1547 or 1548 the Privy Council forbade ashes on Ash Wednesday, palms on Palm Sunday, and candles at Candlemas, before any prayer book existed. Latimer, preaching his Sermon of the Plough at Paul's on 18 January 1548, set ashes among ceremonies of human invention that took from the sufficiency of Christ's passion and cross: the charge was not that ashes were trivial but that they competed with the atonement. The first Book of Common Prayer, in 1549, appointed no ashes and provided instead a service called the Commination. As printed in 1662, it recalls the godly discipline of the primitive church, under which notorious sinners were put to open penance at the beginning of Lent, and appoints in its place, until that discipline can be restored, a reading of God's sentences of cursing against impenitent sinners, each answered by the people's Amen. The worshipper no longer received a mark; he heard a curse and assented to it. The 1662 book still named the day Ash Wednesday in the heading of its collect, and Lancelot Andrewes preached eight Ash Wednesday sermons at court between 1598 and 1624, lamenting in 1622 that fasting had all but disappeared.
The ashes stayed out of Anglican prayer books for some four centuries. The first American book, of 1789, dropped the Commination but kept the day's name and collect; the American book of 1928 gave it a collect, an Epistle and a Gospel, and no ashes. When John Purchas blessed and gave ashes at St James's, Brighton, the Court of Arches in 1870 found the ceremony illegal and admonished him to abstain from it. Their return to the prayer book does not appear to have been the work of the nineteenth-century Oxford Movement. On Steven Wedgeworth's account, ashes are still absent from the Prayer Book Studies of the Episcopal Church's Standing Liturgical Commission in 1957 and present by 1976, and their official recovery belongs to the ecumenical liturgical movement of the mid-twentieth century; individual parishes, as the Purchas case shows, sometimes ran ahead of the rubrics. The American Book of Common Prayer of 1979 was the first in its line to authorize the imposition of ashes, as an option, with a newly composed Litany of Penitence; the Church of England followed with Lent, Holy Week, Easter in the 1980s and Common Worship: Times and Seasons after 2000. The Book of Common Prayer (2019) carries the rite conditionally, providing for the imposition only where ashes are to be imposed; no account of the reasoning behind that provision has been found. In the Roman Church, Paul VI's Paenitemini of 1966 reduced the obligatory fast to two days, Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and the Roman Missal of 1969 added a second formula for the imposition, from Mark 1:15, the call to repent and believe the gospel.
One tension in the day is at least four centuries old. Its Gospel, read before the people come forward to be marked, forbids a visible fast: "when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others" (Matthew 6:17-18, ESV). Andrewes preached twice on that text for this day, in a church that had taken the mark away. Where the sign is kept, the rite reads the warning against display and then marks those who have heard it, with ashes its own blessing calls a sign of penitence.
Further reading. Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars (Yale, 1992) is recommended for the late medieval English religion within which the day was kept and the Reformation that ended its rite.
Online resources. Thurston's article "Ash Wednesday" and the companion article "Lent" in the Catholic Encyclopedia gather the early evidence for the name, the palms, the blessing, and the Synod of Benevento, though they are dated and written from within one tradition. Roger Pearse's "The origins of Ash Wednesday" sets out the Old Gelasian evidence. Steven Wedgeworth's essay on the Anglican history of Ash Wednesday, at Ad Fontes, is the fullest narrative found of the suppression and return of the ashes in the Anglican tradition. The appointed readings are at Bible Gateway in the English Standard Version: Joel 2:1-2, 12-17, Isaiah 58:1-12, 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10, and Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21.
Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made, and you forgive the sins of all who are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.