Between Septuagesima and Quinquagesima

Liturgical seasons have a tendency to bleed.

Before I explain what I mean, let me give a brief (and highly condensed!) background of the liturgical year. The early Church kept one great feast: the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, celebrated every Sunday and most especially on that Sunday closest to the Jewish feast of Passover. Christians gathered each week–“early on the first day,” just like the women who went to the tomb to anoint a corpse that wasn’t there–and each year to celebrate the mighty act by which God defeated Sin and conquered Death. The Paschal event was and is the sure sign that, in Christ, the world has been transformed, and that those who trust in Jesus will share in his victory.

The centrality of Easter shaped sacramental practice as well as liturgical timekeeping. The celebration of the Holy Eucharist, instituted by Christ “on the night in which he was betrayed,” became the principal act of worship on Sundays because through it the Church was continually knit together as and nourished by the crucified and risen Body of Jesus. The administration of Holy Baptism, rooted in the same theological convictions, nevertheless followed a different pattern. The New Testament clearly describes baptism as offered more or less immediately after a person professes faith in Christ. Yet in the early years of the Church, baptism came to be reserved for the annual observance of the Great Vigil–the nightlong watch anticipating Easter–because through baptism each believer is buried with Christ in his death, and shares in his resurrection. Thus the Risen Christ stands at the center of the Christian faith, influencing both the things we do and the times and seasons at which we do them.

But of course there can be no risen Jesus without a dead Jesus. I hope you will forgive a statement that may seem blatantly obvious or even flippant. I promise it is neither. Many and varied are the teachings which, from the earliest days of the Church to the present, attempt to empty the Cross of its scandal and power by denying the actual death of Christ. The motivation behind these heretical movements is understandable. God is great. Death is awful. It would be natural for a person to hold both of these truths and then to reason that “Surely, God would not do anything as vulgar as dying! Surely Jesus only seemed to suffer–only appeared to give up the ghost.”

Against such reasonable but wrongheaded ways of thinking the Church insistently proclaimed that Christ really did die. And the celebration of the Paschal mystery reinforced this teaching by regarding the Triduum–the “Three Days” including Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday into the Great Vigil of Easter–as a single liturgical act. In this way, the Feast of the Resurrection bled back into the preceding days to create Holy Week, the logically and temporally necessary lead up to the great truth proclaimed on Easter Sunday.

In a similar way, the baptismal emphasis of the Great Vigil meant that the days preceding Holy Week itself became days of intense teaching, prayer, and spiritual preparation for the rite of initiation. Fasting, acts of special devotion, and a particular emphasis on reconciliation and penance marked the weeks before the first and greatest feast. The biblical example of Jesus, driven by the Spirit to fast and pray and face temptation in the wilderness, gave the season a specific duration of 40 days. And so Lent was born, beginning with another biblical precedent for penance and fasting: sprinkling or marking the brow with ashes as a sign of mortality and humility.

(The question of Jesus’ own sharing in that mortality and humility through his incarnation and nativity was the other great theological controversy of the early Church, and is manifested liturgically in the other great cycle of the liturgical year: Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. But that is another story for another time…)

Here is where the title of today’s Dispatch becomes relevant. (I hope at least a few of you wondered over that name, and also have read this far!) The tendency of liturgical observances to bleed beyond their boundaries continued even after the Lent-Holy Week-Easter pattern was established. For centuries, the Church anticipated the anticipatory observance of Lent itself. The three Sundays before Lent were given the names Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima–Latin for “seventieth [day],” “sixtieth [day],” and “fiftieth [day],” respectively. These three weeks before Lent became a time for the Church to prepare to prepare, as it were.

In some places, that preparation took the form of a brief season of feasting and revelry before the fast. Hence the carnival or mardi gras celebrations in many cultures. In other places, particularly in the Eastern Church, these pre-Lenten Sundays became a time to ease into Lent, removing indulgences each week until the full fast began in earnest.

Sexagesima is the name traditionally given to this coming Sunday. While the Pre-Lenten season may not be much emphasized today, I invite you now to begin to prepare to prepare. Let the grace of the coming season of Lent–a time of “self examination and repentance…prayer, fasting, and self-denial; [and]...reading and meditating on God’s holy Word”–begin to bleed into your spiritual life in this moment. After all, we sanctify our marking of this time–and all time–in order to remember the One who bled and rose for us.