Can you remember an earlier Lent?   We had hardly packed away the Crib, said our final farewells to the Christmas season at Candlemas (2nd Feb) when, instead of the three or so weeks that we normally get as a kind of buffer, a transition from the weeks of jollity and fun of the festive season, we were immediately plunged into the solemnity of Lent.   It was time to burn last year’s Palm Crosses and smear the ash on our foreheads because Ash Wednesday burst upon us, out of the blue.   My wife and I weren’t able to finish up all the chocs and other delicacies (thanks you, generous parishioners!) before it was time to pack them all away because the annual time of austerity was upon us.

Do you know how the Church works out when Ash Wednesday will fall?   It’s always the seventh Wednesday before Easter Day, and that can fall within a five-week period depending on the sun, the moon and mathematics:  the simple formula is that it’s the first Sunday after the first New Moon after the Vernal Equinox.   So now you know!   This shifting Easter causes a lot of commercial problems and requires us to be very alert in our planning.   This year it’s so early – within one day of the earliest it can be – that many state schools have decided that their ‘Easter’ holiday won’t start until two weeks after Easter!   For decades there have been calls to do away with all this and fix Easter on a convenient Spring Sundays – the second Sunday in April, for example – and have done with it.   I’d really regret that.   The complexity and irrationality of when Easter falls reminds me that the cycles of sun, moon and seasons aren’t something I control – they were there long before I was.   It links me with our ancestors who, far beyond the familiar luxuries of 21st century Kensington, had to rely on sun, moon and seasons to hunt, plant and harvest.  It links me with Jesus himself, whose life and death related to the cycles of the ancient Jewish lunar calendar.

And if Lent are about as early as they possibly can be it feels as though nature itself knows all about it.   I’ve never known buds to flower so early, or so many glorious days of pin-sharp spring sunshine from dawn to dusk.   Unfortunately we all know why spring is weeks early:  nothing to do with the religious cycle but everything to do with human rapacity, selfishness and greed.

What Christians know is that, if Ash Wednesday and the penitential season of Lent burst upon us long before we’re ready, heralding the approach of Good Friday, Jesus’s betrayal, torture and shameful death – the events which most shockingly link us to all that is evil in human actions – then just as early will come the glorious dawn of Easter, the message of Resurrection, the promise of new life for us and all creation.   It’s all there, if only we dare to grasp it.