Why does lent last 40 days

Support Aleteia! Here are some numbers: 20 million users around the world read Aleteia. As you can imagine, these numbers represent a lot of work. We need you. It only takes a minute. Thank you! Donate now! Brian: Yeah. Sean: Do you know why that is? Armando: I thought it has to do with Good Friday. Ding Anna: Yeah. Anna: My mom would be so proud.

Tara: A Palm Sunday. Brian: B Gaudete Sunday. Lea: Or C the Triduum. Anna: This is a tough one. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. Lent Last updated Lent Find this year's dates in the multifaith calendar Lent is the period of 40 days which comes before Easter in the Christian calendar.

Why 40 days? The Hebrews spent 40 years in the wilderness before reaching the land promised to them by God. Moses fasted for 40 days before receiving the ten commandments on Mount Sinai. Jesus spent 40 days fasting in the wilderness in preparation for his ministry.

Most Christians regard Jesus' time in the wilderness as the key event for the duration of Lent. Why is it called Lent? The colour purple Purple is the symbolic colour used in some churches throughout Lent, for drapes and altar frontals. East and West Both the eastern and western churches observe Lent but they count the 40 days differently. The churches also start Lent on different days. The last week of Lent is called Holy Week.

Penitence Shrove Tuesday gets its name from the ritual of shriving that Christians used to undergo in the past. In the Catholic or Orthodox context, the absolution is pronounced by a priest. Over years ago a monk wrote in the Anglo-Saxon Ecclesiastical Institutes: In the week immediately before Lent everyone shall go to his confessor and confess his deeds and the confessor shall so shrive him.

Anglo-Saxon Ecclesiastical Institutes. Ash Wednesday services The service draws on the ancient Biblical traditions of covering one's head with ashes, wearing sackcloth, and fasting. The mark of ashes In Ash Wednesday services churchgoers are marked on the forehead with a cross of ashes as a sign of penitence and mortality. The use of ashes, made by burning palm crosses from the previous Palm Sunday, is very symbolic.

God our Father, you create us from the dust of the earth. Grant that these ashes may be for us a sign of our penitence, and a symbol of our mortality.

In the language of the Church, Lent has historically been known by the Latin term Quadragesima —literally, These 40 days of preparation for the Resurrection of Christ on Easter Sunday were, again, not approximate or metaphorical but literal, and taken very seriously as so by the entire Christian Church from the days of the Apostles. The Apostles, therefore, legislated for our weakness, by instituting, at the very commencement of the Christian Church, that the Solemnity of Easter should be preceded by a universal Fast; and it was only natural, that they should have made this period of Penance to consist of Forty Days, seeing that our Divine Master had consecrated that number by his own Fast.

Jerome, St. Leo the Great, St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. Isidore of Seville, and others of the Holy Fathers, assure us that Lent was instituted by the Apostles, although, at the commencement, there was not any uniform way of observing it.

Over time, however, differences arose over how the 40 days of fasting were to be observed—though never of the necessity of 40 days of fasting. The practice of this Church being never to fast on Saturdays, the number of fasting-days in Lent, besides the six Sundays of Lent, on which, by universal custom, the Faithful never fasted, there were also the six Saturdays, which the Greeks would never allow to be observed as days of fasting : so that their Lent was short, by twelve days, of the Forty spent by our Saviour in the Desert.

To make up the deficiency, they were obliged to begin their Lent so many days earlier. In the Western Church, however, the practice was different:. The Church of Rome had no such motive for anticipating the season of those privations, which belong to Lent; for, from the earliest antiquity, she kept the Saturdays of Lent, and as often, during the rest of the year, as circumstances might require, as fasting days.

At the close of the 6th century, St. Gregory the Great, alludes, in one of his Homilies, to the fast of Lent being less than Forty Days, owing to the Sundays which come during that holy season. As we do not fast on the six Sundays, there are but thirty-six fasting days;.

As early, however, as the 9th century, the custom of beginning Lent on Ash Wednesday was of obligation in the whole Latin Church. All the manuscript copies of the Gregorian Sacramentary, which bear that date, call this Wednesday the In capite jejunii , that is to say, the beginning of the fast; and Amalarius, who gives us every detail of the Liturgy of the 9th century, tells us, that it was, even then, the rule to begin the Fast four days before the first Sunday of Lent.

There can be no doubt, but that the original motive for this anticipation,—which, after several modifications, was limited to the four days immediately preceding Lent,—was to remove from the Greeks the pretext of taking scandal at the Latins, who did not fast a full Forty days.