The earliest mention of Lent in the history of the Church comes from the council of Nicaea in 325 AD. The council of Nicaea is best known for the profession of faith – the ‘Nicene Creed’ – which is still recited in most parishes every Sunday immediately after the sermon. However, the council also issued twenty canons of a practical nature, dealing with various aspects of church life, and the fifth of these canons speaks of Lent.

The word used for Lent in this fifth canon is tessarakonta (in the original Greek), which means ‘forty.’ For the first time in recorded history, we have mention of this period of preparation for Easter as lasting forty days. Much earlier, Christians had introduced Easter Sunday to celebrate Christ’s resurrection. Soon afterwards, a period of two or three days preparation, specially commemorating Christ’s passion and death – the ‘Holy Week’ part of Lent today – had been adopted by various Christian communities. But the first mention of a preparatory period lasting the forty days comes from this fifth canon of Nicaea. The length of time was adopted in imitation of the forty days that Jesus spent in the desert at the beginning of His public ministry: Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights and afterwards He was famished (Matthew 4:1-2).

Scripture and the early Church suggested a variety of ways in which this ‘lengthening’ might come about, a variety of ways in which we can cooperate with God’s grace. The passage from chapter 4 in Matthew’s Gospel, just mentioned, emphasised the role of fasting. Canon 5 of the council of Nicaea emphasised rather the importance of forgiveness and harmony within the Christian community. Thus a Synod (local church council) was to be held ‘before Lent so that, all pettiness being set aside, the gift offered to God may be unblemished.’ Various other features of Lent came to be drawn in, as we shall see.

Lent is very ecumenical. At the time of the council of Nicaea, the Church was still united, East and West. We are long before the sad division of the Church into Catholics and Orthodox, which came about in the eleventh century. Indeed the council of Nicaea belongs principally to the Eastern Church: the city lies in modern Turkey. Most Protestant Churches recognise the authority of the early councils and therefore, at least tacitly, the canons of Nicaea. Article 21 of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, in the form first promulgated in 1563, states explicitly that respect should be given to the council of Nicaea. In keeping Lent, therefore, Christians can celebrate the Eastern roots of their faith. They can rejoice, too, that despite the sad divisions which still remain, unity among them is fundamental. Christians are much more united than divided.

This twofold dimension of Lent – joy and preparation – is elaborated in the Second Vatican Council’s decree on the Liturgy (Sacrosanctum concilium, 109-10). The council of Nicaea in 325 and the Second Vatican Council may be seen as the two poles in the history of Lent: Nicaea acknowledged its existence while Vatican II confirmed its importance. The sixteen centuries between the two councils saw a variety of developments in the way Christians observed this season. The ‘week’ begins with Palm Sunday, commemorating Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem (Matthew 21:1-9; Mark 11:1-10; Luke 19:21-38; John 12:12-18). It moves to the ‘Last Supper’ with His disciples on Maundy Thursday – ‘Maundy’ deriving from the Latin mandatum, meaning commandment, following Christ’s invitation: ‘A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another even as I have loved you’ (John 13:34) – and His prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, followed by His arrest and the beginning of His trial. Good Friday – ‘good’ in the sense that it is the day on which our redemption is realised – commemorates the bitter details of Christ’s passion: His scourging and crowning with thorns; His condemnation by Pontius Pilate; His journey to Calvary; His death on the cross; and His burial. Holy Saturday quietly remembers Christ’s time in the tomb, and Easter Sunday rejoices in His resurrection ‘on the third day’ – ‘third’ in the sense of counting Friday, Saturday and Sunday.