The Season of Lent: An Anglican Perspective

The Forty Days of Preparation for Easter

The Season of Lent is the great penitential season of the Anglican year, forty days of fasting, self-examination, prayer, repentance, and preparation for the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It begins on Ash Wednesday and reaches its culmination in Holy Week, carrying the Church toward the Paschal feast of Easter. The BCP 2019 places the weekdays of Lent among the Days of Discipline, Denial, and Special Prayer and gives the season its own Collects, lectionary, Proper Preface, and special liturgies.

The familiar number forty comes above all from our Lord’s forty days of fasting and temptation in the wilderness. From Ash Wednesday through Holy Saturday there are forty-six calendar days. The six Sundays belong fully to the Season of Lent, but Sundays are never fast days in the Prayer Book’s reckoning because every Sunday is the Lord’s Day, the weekly celebration of the Resurrection. Removing those six Sundays leaves the traditional forty days of the Lenten fast. The BCP states the principle directly: “The forty days refer to our Lord’s time of fasting in the wilderness; and since Sundays are never fast days, Ash Wednesday is the beginning of the Lenten Fast.” (BCP 2019, p. 542)

Lent is therefore not forty days of religious gloom, nor an annual attempt to earn God’s favor through intensified discipline. It is a season in which the Church deliberately places herself again beneath Christ’s call to repent and believe the Gospel. The Prayer Book describes its purpose from the beginning: Christians enter these forty days hearing and answering the Savior’s call to repentance so that they may enter fully into the joyful celebration of his Resurrection.

The Ancient Roots of Lent

Christian fasting before Easter reaches back into the earliest centuries of the Church. Around the end of the second century, Irenaeus of Lyons described differing practices concerning the length of the pre-Paschal fast. Some fasted one day, some two, some longer, and another reckoning referred to forty hours. The important point is not that the mature forty-day Lent already existed in exactly its later form, but that Christians were already preparing for Easter through fasting and that the duration of this preparation varied among churches. 

By the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, Canon 5 refers without explanation to a period called tessarakostē (tes-sar-ah-kos-TAY), conventionally translated Lent. The council did not institute the season or describe its complete form, which itself suggests that the observance was already familiar. The reference is important evidence for an established pre-Paschal season by the early fourth century, while other early sources show that its precise duration and fasting practices continued to vary among Christian communities. 

The number forty carried deep biblical associations long before the Christian calendar reached its mature form. Moses remained with the Lord on Sinai for forty days and forty nights. Elijah journeyed forty days to Horeb, the mountain of God. Israel wandered forty years in the wilderness. Above all, Jesus fasted forty days in the wilderness, resisting the temptations of the devil before beginning his public ministry. The Church’s forty-day preparation for Easter became especially associated with that wilderness fast.

By the fourth century, Lent had become a well-established period of preparation for Easter in many parts of the Church, though local practices continued to vary. It acquired particular importance for catechumens preparing for Holy Baptism at Easter and for penitents preparing to be reconciled to the fellowship of the Church. Baptism, repentance, reconciliation, and the Paschal mystery therefore stood before the whole Christian community rather than belonging only to private devotion.

Persecution, the Lapsi, and Reconciliation

The penitential life of the early Church gained particular pastoral urgency during the great persecutions of the third and early fourth centuries. Under Emperor Decius beginning in AD 250, Christians were required to demonstrate loyalty to the Roman gods through sacrifice. Some complied under pressure, while others obtained certificates claiming that they had sacrificed. Those who failed in these ways became known as the lapsi (LAP-see), the lapsed.

When persecution subsided, many sought restoration to the Church. Their return raised painful questions. Could those who had publicly denied Christ under persecution be restored? If so, what would repentance and reconciliation require? Rigorist movements resisted restoration in some cases, while bishops such as Cyprian of Carthage defended the possibility of reconciliation through genuine repentance and appropriate ecclesiastical discipline.

Similar questions appeared during later persecutions, including controversies surrounding clergy accused of surrendering Scriptures or sacred objects. These crises forced the Church to confront both the seriousness of apostasy and the reach of Christ’s mercy.

The persecutions did not create Lent. Pre-Easter fasting and preparation were older than the Decian crisis, and it would be misleading to explain the origin of Lent primarily through the lapsi. The crises did, however, give concrete pastoral form to the Church’s penitential discipline. A season already ordered toward Easter became a natural setting for the restoration of those who had fallen seriously and repented.

The BCP 2019 preserves the larger ancient pattern without tying Lent to one particular persecution. Its Ash Wednesday Invitation recalls that Lent became a time in which converts were prepared for Holy Baptism and those separated from the faithful because of notorious sins were reconciled and restored to the fellowship of the Church. The whole congregation was thereby reminded both of the Gospel’s message of pardon and absolution and of the continual need to renew repentance and faith. (BCP 2019, p. 543)

That balance is essential. Lent takes sin seriously because the Gospel takes forgiveness seriously. The Church does not practice repentance because Christ’s mercy is uncertain. She practices repentance because the merciful Christ calls sinners home.

Why Forty Days?

The traditional forty-day Lenten fast requires an important distinction. Lent contains more than forty calendar days because the six Sundays are not counted among the fasting days. From Ash Wednesday through Holy Saturday there are forty-six calendar days, and removing the six Sundays leaves forty fasting days.

This does not mean Sundays somehow cease to belong to Lent. The First Sunday in Lent is still Lenten, as are the Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Sundays and Palm Sunday. Their Collects, readings, customary color, omission of the Alleluia, and overall liturgical character remain part of the season. The distinction concerns fasting rather than whether the Sunday belongs to Lent.

That distinction preserves something important about Christian asceticism. Even within the Church’s great penitential season, the Resurrection remains the fundamental reality around which Christian time is ordered. Lent cannot become an uninterrupted block of penitence in which Easter is forgotten. Every Lord’s Day reminds the Church that the one she follows through the wilderness is already the risen Lord.

The present Western arrangement developed over centuries rather than appearing fully formed at one moment. The exact shape of Lent varied across ancient Christian communities before the Western pattern became settled. It is therefore better to speak of gradual development than to identify one pope, council, or controversy as the inventor of the forty-day Lent.

Lent and the Anglican Reformation

The English Church observed Lent for centuries before the Reformation. When the first Book of Common Prayer appeared in 1549, Thomas Cranmer did not abolish the Christian year or the Lenten season. The reformed Prayer Book retained Lent while placing its observance firmly within the proclamation of Scripture, common prayer, repentance, and the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

It is better not to describe Cranmer’s approach simply with the later slogan via media, as though he consciously designed a midpoint between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. The English Reformation understood itself as a reform of the Western Church according to Holy Scripture and in continuity with the ancient Church. Within that framework, Lent could be retained while teachings and practices judged inconsistent with the Gospel were corrected.

The 1662 Book of Common Prayer continued the Lenten inheritance, appointing the Lenten Sundays and retaining the Commination for Ash Wednesday, a solemn service recalling the ancient discipline of public penitence, declaring God’s judgment upon sin, calling the congregation to repentance, and praying for mercy. The medieval ceremonial imposition of ashes was absent from the Prayer Book rite, but the theological substance of penitence remained.

The BCP 2019 stands within that inheritance while providing a fuller Ash Wednesday liturgy, including provision for the blessing and imposition of ashes. It also provides special liturgies for Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and the Great Vigil of Easter. Anglican Lent is therefore both reformed and deeply rooted in the ancient Christian inheritance: Scripture, repentance, fasting, Baptism, reconciliation, and the Paschal mystery remain at its center.

The Invitation to a Holy Lent

The BCP 2019’s Ash Wednesday liturgy gives perhaps the clearest Anglican explanation of how Lent is to be kept. After recalling the ancient purposes of baptismal preparation and reconciliation, the Officiant says:

“I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent: by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and alms-giving; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.” (BCP 2019, p. 544)

That sentence gives Lent its practical architecture. Self-examination and repentance require honest attention to sin. Lent is not primarily an opportunity to devise an impressive spiritual challenge. It begins by asking where we have departed from God’s commandments, what sins have been excused or hidden, and where Christ is calling us to return.

Prayer turns the Christian toward God. The Daily Office, the Psalms, the Great Litany, intercession, silence, and meditation upon Scripture all belong naturally to Lenten devotion. The BCP says that the Great Litany is commonly used before the Holy Eucharist on the First Sunday in Lent and may also be used on other Sundays, on days of fasting, and on other appropriate occasions. 

Fasting engages the body. Hunger exposes dependence, interrupts ordinary habits of gratification, and can remind the Christian of Jesus’ words, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”(Matthew 4:4, ESV) Christian discipleship concerns embodied human beings, not disembodied souls, and the body itself can be trained in dependence and prayer.

Almsgiving directs repentance outward in mercy. Isaiah 58 refuses to recognize a fast that leaves oppression, selfishness, and neglect of the needy untouched. Voluntarily eating less while remaining indifferent to a hungry neighbor has missed the biblical purpose of the discipline.

Finally, reading and meditating upon God’s Word places every Lenten practice beneath Scripture. Lent is not forty days of spiritual self-invention. God’s Word reveals sin, announces grace, exposes false motives, teaches obedience, and continually directs the penitent back toward Christ.

Fasting and Self-Denial

Fasting should not be stretched until the word means any difficult thing a Christian chooses to give up. In Scripture and historic Christian usage, fasting concerns food. The BCP likewise describes fasting in terms of reduced consumption joined with prayer, self-examination, and acts of mercy. 

This does not make other forms of self-denial unhelpful. Giving up alcohol, entertainment, unnecessary spending, social media, or another comfort may reveal how strongly a habit has taken hold and create more space for prayer and attentiveness. Such disciplines can be valuable during Lent, but they are better described as self-denial rather than as though the word fasting simply meant giving up anything at all.

The BCP preserves an important distinction among these practices. Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are traditionally “days of special devotion and total abstinence.” The weekdays of Lent and every Friday of the year outside the Twelve Days of Christmas and Fifty Days of Eastertide are encouraged as days of fasting. Ember Days and Rogation Days may also be kept in this way. 

Fasting should also be governed by wisdom and charity. Age, pregnancy, illness, medication, a history of disordered eating, strenuous physical labor, and other legitimate circumstances can make strict restriction unwise or inappropriate. Christian fasting is not permission to injure the body God has given, nor is severity a measure of holiness. The discipline exists to serve prayer, repentance, dependence, and mercy, not to create a religious contest.

The question is therefore not simply, How much can I deny myself? A better question is, How can this discipline expose what rules me, turn me toward God, and make me more available to love my neighbor?

Lent Is Not Self-Salvation

The disciplines of Lent can easily be misunderstood as a program of spiritual self-improvement. Fasting, prayer, almsgiving, Scripture, and self-examination are all real Christian practices, but none earns justification or places God in the sinner’s debt.

The Ash Wednesday Collect makes the order of grace unmistakable. The Church prays, “Create and make in us new and contrite hearts.” (BCP 2019, p. 544) We do not first manufacture contrition and then present it to God as the price of forgiveness. We ask God to create the very heart with which faithful repentance becomes possible. 

The same pattern runs through the Lenten Collects. Again and again the Church asks God to defend, govern, strengthen, cleanse, direct, and give grace. Christian discipline is active, but it is never independent. God’s grace precedes the response, accompanies it, and brings it toward its proper end.

Lent is therefore not Pelagian self-improvement dressed in purple. It is a season of grace-shaped repentance. Christians fast because God has shown mercy. They confess because Christ has provided forgiveness. They strive for holiness because the Holy Spirit is at work conforming them to Christ. Grace is not opposed to obedience; grace creates and sustains obedience. The error lies in imagining that obedience is the cause of grace rather than its fruit.

Temptation and the First Sunday in Lent

Every year the First Sunday in Lent places Jesus in the wilderness. Matthew, Mark, and Luke each bear witness to the temptation of Christ, and the three-year lectionary ensures that the Church begins the Sunday sequence of Lent not primarily by contemplating her own discipline but by looking at the obedience of the Son.

Jesus enters the wilderness after his Baptism, fasts, and is tempted by the devil. Where Adam failed, and where Israel repeatedly failed in the wilderness, the faithful Son remains obedient. His forty days are therefore not merely an inspiring example of unusually successful spiritual discipline. They belong to his saving obedience as the true Son.

At the same time, Christians do learn from his resistance. Jesus answers temptation with the Word of God. He refuses to turn bodily hunger into disobedience, refuses the spectacular testing of the Father, and rejects worldly dominion offered apart from the path the Father has appointed.

The First Sunday therefore establishes the proper order for Lent. Christians enter the wilderness with Christ, but they do not save themselves there. They follow the faithful Son who has already gone before them and whose righteousness, victory, and grace sustain those who belong to him.

The Sundays of Lent

The intervening Sundays develop differently in the three-year lectionary, so Lent should not be reduced to one rigid thematic sequence applied identically every year. Yet the season possesses a clear movement. The First Sunday begins in the wilderness, the intervening weeks unfold themes of faith, repentance, covenant, healing, discipleship, new life, and the identity of Christ, and by the Fifth Sunday the Passion has moved unmistakably into the foreground.

The Fifth Sunday bears the BCP subtitle Passion Sunday. The name preserves an older Western inheritance in which the final portion of Lent before Easter became associated with intensified attention to the suffering of Christ. The BCP 2019 does not establish Passiontide as a separate liturgical season or prescribe the full range of historical customs associated with it, but its retention of the title Passion Sunday is significant. Lent has reached the point at which the Cross can no longer remain on the distant horizon.

Palm Sunday then begins Holy Week. It does not represent an abrupt abandonment of everything Lent has been doing. Holy Week is the culmination toward which the Lenten journey has been moving. Fasting, repentance, prayer, Scripture, and works of mercy are not exercises performed for five weeks before the Church suddenly changes subjects and begins talking about Jesus. From Ash Wednesday onward the disciplines exist in order to prepare Christians to enter more deeply into the saving Passion and Resurrection of Christ.

Holy Week: The Culmination of Lent

Holy Week brings the Lenten journey into its most concentrated form. Palm Sunday opens with Christ’s triumphal entry and then proclaims the Passion. The Church holds acclaim and Crucifixion together because the King enters Jerusalem precisely to give himself for sinners.

Maundy Thursday gathers the Church around Christ’s commandment of love, his washing of the disciples’ feet, the institution of the Eucharist, and his betrayal. Good Friday stands with Ash Wednesday among the Church’s most solemn fast days and places the Cross at the center of Christian worship. Holy Saturday waits beside the tomb in solemn expectation.

The Great Vigil of Easter stands at the threshold between Lent and Easter. In darkness the Church rehearses the great story of salvation, Baptism is celebrated or baptismal vows are renewed, the light of Christ enters, and the restraint of Lent finally gives way to the Easter proclamation. The BCP describes the Vigil as the Passover of the Lord in which, through his Word and Sacraments, the Church shares in Christ’s victory over death. 

The movement is deliberate. Lent does not terminate in successful self-discipline. It terminates in Christ. The season has been preparing Christians not to admire their improved habits but to stand before the Cross, wait at the tomb, and hear again that Jesus Christ has risen bodily from the dead.

The Collects and the Preface of Lent

The Ash Wednesday Collect provides a theological foundation for the whole season: “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.” (BCP 2019, p. 544)

The order of grace is decisive. The Church does not manufacture a contrite heart and then offer it to God as payment for mercy. She asks God to create the heart she needs. Repentance is genuinely our repentance, but grace precedes, awakens, enables, and sustains it.

The Sunday Collects develop the same pattern. They repeatedly ask God to defend, govern, strengthen, direct, cleanse, and give grace to his people. Lent thus teaches dependence not only through fasting but through prayer itself.

The Proper Preface of Lent gives the season its destination and protects it from becoming gloomy or self-enclosed. God bids his faithful people “cleanse their hearts, and prepare with joy for the Paschal feast,” becoming “fervent in prayer and in works of mercy” and “renewed by your Word and Sacraments” as they come to the fullness of grace he has prepared. 

The words prepare with joy are crucial. Penitence is serious, but Christian penitence is not despair. Fasting is real, but the fast has a feast in view. The faithful labor in prayer and works of mercy, but they are renewed by God’s Word and Sacraments. Lent is therefore not a retreat from grace into human effort. God continues to speak, feed, absolve, and sustain his people throughout the season.

Scripture and the Daily Office

Lent has always possessed a strong catechetical dimension because the ancient preparation of candidates for Easter Baptism required sustained instruction in the Christian faith. The BCP’s Ash Wednesday invitation continues that instinct by explicitly joining the season to reading and meditating upon God’s holy Word.

For Anglicans, the Daily Office provides one of the most natural ways to deepen that practice. Morning and Evening Prayer order the day around confession, Psalms, Scripture, praise, intercession, and Collects. Someone who does not ordinarily pray both offices need not turn Lent into an unsustainable spiritual project. Faithful consistency is usually more fruitful than ambitious excess.

The seven traditional penitential Psalms, Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143, are especially appropriate companions through the season. They provide the Church with inspired language for guilt, sorrow, mercy, waiting, forgiveness, and hope.

The purpose of intensified Scripture reading is not merely to finish a plan. Lent asks Christians to listen more carefully to the God who speaks. The Word exposes sin, but it also announces Christ. It commands obedience, but it also gives promises. It strips away self-deception while continually directing the sinner toward grace.

Works of Mercy

The Proper Preface of Lent places works of mercy alongside fervent prayer, and the Ash Wednesday invitation names almsgiving explicitly. This is important because penitence can become strangely self-centered. A Christian can spend considerable energy thinking about personal disciplines while scarcely noticing the needs of another person.

Biblical fasting refuses that separation. Isaiah 58 condemns a fast joined to exploitation and indifference. Jesus places almsgiving, prayer, and fasting beside one another in Matthew 6 and subjects all three to the same searching question of the heart.

Lenten generosity may therefore take many concrete forms: increased giving to the poor, support for ministries of mercy and mission, practical service, hospitality, visiting the lonely, caring for the sick, or directing money saved through simpler consumption toward those in need. The purpose is not to create another category in which Christians can measure their spiritual success. Mercy is the outward fruit of having received mercy.

Liturgical Restraint

Purple is the customary liturgical color of Lent, fitting the season’s themes of penitence, preparation, humility, and self-examination. It characterizes the season through its numbered Sundays and Passion Sunday, before Holy Week brings a more concentrated liturgical focus upon the Passion.

The visual restraint of Lent serves the season’s theological movement. The Church is not pretending that Christ has not risen, but she deliberately refrains from some of the festal language associated most directly with Easter so that its return may be heard with greater force.

The Alleluia is traditionally omitted during Lent. Other forms of simplification in music, decoration, ceremonial, or the use of images may also be observed according to local Anglican custom. Such practices should be distinguished from universal Prayer Book requirements where the BCP does not prescribe every detail.

The point is not aesthetic severity for its own sake. The Church sometimes prepares for joy through restraint. Absence teaches the heart to notice what ordinary abundance can make easy to overlook.

Sundays and the Lenten Fast

Because Sundays are not counted among the forty fasting days, Christians sometimes conclude that every personal Lenten discipline should simply be abandoned each Sunday. The Prayer Book gives us a more careful principle.

The Lord’s Day is not a fast day, and Christians should not turn Sunday into a penitential day indistinguishable from the weekdays of Lent. Yet Sunday remains within the Season of Lent. Its Collects, readings, customary purple, omission of the Alleluia, and overall liturgical character make that clear.

For an individual discipline, pastoral wisdom is appropriate. A dietary fast may rightly be relaxed on Sunday because Sunday is not a fasting day. Other disciplines, particularly those intended to break a harmful habit or restore a neglected good, may make little sense to suspend weekly. Someone limiting social media because it has become compulsive need not binge every Sunday merely to prove the day is festal.

The controlling principle is theological rather than legalistic. Sunday remains the weekly feast of the Resurrection even during Lent, while the season as a whole continues to form the Church in preparation for Easter.

The Annunciation During Lent

March 25 frequently falls during Lent, and the Feast of the Annunciation provides a beautiful Christological interruption within the season’s purple. As a Red-Letter Holy Day centered upon the Incarnation, it is fittingly observed in white when celebrated.

The juxtaposition is not an intrusion upon Lent. The child conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary is the Son who has taken our human nature precisely so that he may suffer, die, and rise for our salvation. The Annunciation’s Collect itself moves from the Incarnation announced by the angel through Christ’s Cross and Passion to the glory of his Resurrection.

The BCP’s calendar rules nevertheless preserve the integrity of Lent and Holy Week. A Holy Day that falls on a Sunday may be observed on that Sunday except during Advent, Lent, and Easter. In addition, no Holy Day or other observance may replace the fixed propers for Ash Wednesday, Holy Week, or Easter Week. Thus, when March 25 encounters one of those higher-ranking observances, the Annunciation yields to the governing calendar rubrics rather than displacing the appointed propers. 

That ordering illustrates something important. Even the Church’s great penitential season is centered upon Christ rather than upon penitence itself. The Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection belong to one Gospel.

Observing the Season of Lent

Begin Lent with the Ash Wednesday liturgy where possible and allow the Church’s invitation, rather than personal preference alone, to define the season. Examine yourself honestly. Repent of particular sins. Pray. Fast. Give. Read and meditate upon Scripture. The Prayer Book’s simplicity is wiser than an elaborate spiritual program devised primarily to feel ambitious.

Establish a pattern of bodily fasting appropriate to your circumstances. Remember that the weekdays of Lent are encouraged as days of fasting and that Ash Wednesday and Good Friday carry particular weight as days traditionally marked by special devotion and total abstinence. If health or other circumstances require modification, practice the discipline wisely rather than competitively.

Choose forms of self-denial where they expose attachments that have become spiritually unhealthy. If a habit cannot be voluntarily surrendered for even a season without resentment or anxiety, that fact may reveal something worth examining. Yet the purpose is freedom for obedience, not arbitrary deprivation.

Deepen prayer through the Daily Office, the Psalms, the Great Litany, or another sustainable Anglican rhythm. Let Scripture shape the season rather than merely supplement it. Attend the Sunday Eucharist faithfully and receive Word and Sacrament as gifts by which God renews his people.

Let fasting become generosity. Direct money, time, attention, and practical care toward others. Seek reconciliation where relationships have been damaged, and where a burdened conscience would benefit from it, consider making use of the Rite of Reconciliation of a Penitent with a priest.

Do not judge another Christian’s Lent by the severity or visibility of his discipline. Jesus’ warning in Matthew 6 remains relevant throughout the season. Prayer, fasting, and giving can become performances if the heart seeks human approval rather than God.

Finally, let the season grow increasingly Christ-centered as Holy Week approaches. Lent begins with ashes and the wilderness, but it does not remain there. Passion Sunday sharpens the focus, Palm Sunday opens Holy Week, Maundy Thursday brings the upper room and Gethsemane, Good Friday brings the Cross, and Holy Saturday brings the tomb. The entire season exists to prepare the Church for the Paschal mystery.

Conclusion

The Season of Lent is not an annual project in spiritual self-improvement. It is the Church’s forty-day school of repentance and preparation, shaped by the wilderness of Christ, the call of Scripture, the discipline of fasting, the life of prayer, works of mercy, the memory of Baptism, and the Gospel promise of reconciliation. Its ancient history includes catechumens preparing for new life and penitents seeking restoration, but both remind the whole Church of the same truth: every Christian lives by grace and continually needs renewed repentance and faith.

The disciplines are therefore serious without becoming meritorious. Christians fast, pray, give, confess, read Scripture, and practice self-denial, but none of these acts purchases mercy. The Ash Wednesday Collect asks God to create the contrite heart, while the Proper Preface says that God’s people are renewed by his Word and Sacraments and led toward the fullness of grace he has prepared. Grace precedes the discipline, sustains it, and brings it toward its proper fruit.

Lent finally makes sense only because Easter is coming. Every Sunday interrupts the fast with the weekly proclamation of Resurrection, the Preface tells the Church to prepare with joy for the Paschal feast, and Holy Week brings the entire season to the Cross and tomb of Jesus Christ. The Church enters the wilderness not to remain there, confronts sin not because sin has the final word, and remembers death because death has been conquered. The forty days lead toward the night when restraint ends, light enters the darkness, and the Church proclaims again that Christ is risen.