40? or 46?

I have a question for you.

How many days in Lent?

If you answered "40", huh-uh. There are 46!

"Are you kiddin' me?" you may be asking.

Would I do that? Of course not!

OK. Let's do the math and you can figure it out for yourself. But let's do it backwards -- it's easier that way.

Lent begins with Ash Wednesday and ends the day before Easter. This year Easter falls on April 12th. Take the preceding 11 days of April, add the 31 days of March and you come up with 42. Ash Wednesday was on Feb. 25th, so add the last four days of February and you have 46 days!

What a predicament, especially when you always thought Lent was 40 days. Is there an explanation for this seeming discrepancy? Yes, there is.

Christ's disciples, being Jewish, observed the Sabbath (our Saturday) as their day of worship and rest, because Genesis tells us that God rested on the seventh day. Christ, however, rose from the dead on Sunday, the first day of the week. So the early Christians (including the original disciples) viewed the Resurrection as a new era and transferred the sabbath from Saturday to Sunday.

Early Christians, however, considered Sunday, the Lord's Day, to be a day of celebration, not fasting, and Lent is primarily a time of fasting and prayer. So Sundays were not included in the count when the Church expanded the period of fasting and prayer in preparation for Easter from a few days, originally, to 40 days.

(Forty days, incidentally, was a reminder of the forty days Christ fasted in the desert prior to beginning his public ministry.)

Consequently, to get a forty-day count for Lent, one must include six weeks of six days each for fasting and prayer (that's 36 days), plus Ash Wednesday and the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday following. Add those 4 days to the 36 and you have the 40 days of Lent -- excluding the six Sundays.

More later. After all, we have 6 extra days to explore the subject of Lent more fully.

Preacher's Kid