Ash Wednesday services this Wednesday
This coming Wednesday, March 5th is the first day of Lent this year, and is called Ash Wednesday.
Comox United is not holding a service, but we have been invited to Ash Wednesday services at:
• Weird Church, Cumberland, at 12 noon
• St. Peter’s Anglican Church (Comox) at 600 pm
Why does Lent start on a Wednesday?
Lent is one of the most important seasons of the Christian calendar since it leads up to Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter. But if it’s so important, why doesn’t it start on a Sunday?
In the early Christian church, Lent did first begin on the Sunday that was 6 weeks before Easter. Those six weeks were a time of prayer and fasting — except on Sundays. Because Sunday was the day of Jesus’s Resurrection, early church leaders decreed that Sundays couldn’t be fast days because every Sunday was a day of celebration. So in this early version of Lent, there were 36 days of fasting and 6 Sundays.
In the 7th century, 4 more days of fasting and prayer were added to Lent so that Christians would fast and pray for 40 days in imitation of Jesus’s 40 days of fasting and prayer in the desert (Matthew 4: 1–11). This pushed the first day of Lent back from Sunday to the preceding Wednesday.
And that’s why we have had Ash Wednesday for 1600 years.