Reflections on Septuagesima Sunday

This weekend we come to a Sunday which historically Anglicans have called by the splendid name of Septuagesima Sunday.

This coming Sunday is in fact the ninth Sunday before Easter, or the third Sunday before Lent and its historic name derives from the Latin word for 70th, since the Sunday falls roughly within 70 days of Easter Sunday. 

Until the recent times in which some modern Anglican Prayer Books have adopted the calendrical changes introduced to the Roman Catholic Church by Vatican II, each of the  succeeding Sundays were also named for their distance in number of days from Easter. Hence we had respectively, Sexagesima (60) and Quinquagesima (50) and finally Quadragesima Sunday (40) which last was also the first official Sunday of Lent.

Septuagesima also marked in the early Church (as it still does in the Churches of the East, the beginning of the Lenten fast, since according to certain ways of observing the old liturgical calendar, in addition to Sundays, Thursdays and Saturdays were also days that were outside the  Lenten observance and thus days on which Christians would not have to fast. So, in order still to fit in 40 days of actual fasting before Easter, the Lenten fast had to start two weeks earlier than it does today.

If all this seems overly focused on fasting, there were additional dimensions given in the past to the respective number of days observed.

Thus it was held that the Season of Lent mirrors in days the 40-year Exodus of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt — on their way to ultimate freedom in the Promised Land. And the days from Septuagesima were held to mirror the 70 years of the Babylonian captivity. 

In each case, these parallels framed the Lenten observance within historic precedents of a literal journey that, in the end,  lead from captivity to freedom.  

And so it should be for all Christians as we recognise the salvation won for us by Christ as the ultimate blessing given to us, whereby we can be liberated from the slavery of sin into the promised land of Salvation brought to us in Christ.

Whether we begin to prepare now for Lent, or wish to focus more narrowly on the days of Lent itself — and whatever our particular spiritual disciplines — our ultimate focus should always be upon what aids us most in making spiritual progress along the path of Salvation.

The Rev. Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff
Rector