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Ash Wednesday
“Ash Wednesday” is day when Catholics receive a mark of ashes on their forehead, supposedly as a token of penitence.
Ash Wednesday] was taken from Roman paganism, which took it from Vedic India. Ashes were called the seed of the fire god Agni, with power to forgive sins. Ashes were said to were a symbol for the purifying blood of Shiva, in which, one could bathe away sins. During Rome’s New Year Feast of Atonement in March, people wore sackcloth and bathed in ashes to atone for their sins. As the dying god of March, Mars took his worshippers sins with him into death. The carnival fell on dies martis, the Day of Mars. In English, this was Tuesday, because Mars was identified with the Saxon god Tiw. In French the carnival day was Mardi Gras, “Fat Tuesday,” the day of merrymaking before Ash Wednesday.(illuminati-news.com)
What do Catholics say about Ash Wednesday? According to americancatholic.org
Although Ash Wednesday is not a Catholic holy day of obligation, it is an important part of the season of Lent. The first clear evidence of Ash Wednesday is around 960, and in the 12th century people began using palm branches from the previous Palm Sunday for ashes.
the use of ashes in the Church left only a few records in the first millennium of Church history. Thomas Talley, an expert on the history of the liturgical year, says that the first clearly datable liturgy for Ash Wednesday that provides for sprinkling ashes is in the Romano-Germanic pontifical of 960. Before that time, ashes had been used as a sign of admission to the Order of Penitents. As early as the sixth century, the Spanish Mozarabic rite calls for signing the forehead with ashes when admitting a gravely ill person to the Order of Penitents. At the beginning of the 11th century, Abbot Aelfric notes that it was customary for all the faithful to take part in a ceremony on the Wednesday before Lent that included the imposition of ashes. Near the end of that century, Pope Urban II called for the general use of ashes on that day. Only later did this day come to be called Ash Wednesday.
At first, clerics and men had ashes sprinkled on their heads, while women had the sign of the cross made with ashes on their foreheads. Eventually, of course, the ritual used with women came to be used for men as well.
In the 12th century the rule developed that the ashes were to be created by burning palm branches from the previous Palm Sunday. Many parishes today invite parishioners to bring such palms to church before Lent begins and have a ritual burning of the palms after Mass.
source:americancatholic.org
There is no mention of Ash Wednesday, the practice of it or even a semblance of it in the bible. This is also true with Lent of which Ash Wednesday is supposed to be a preparation for.
So ask yourself this: if you’re a Christian, a true Christian would you practice something not taught by Jesus Christ or his Apostles?
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QUOTE FROM RESBAK:”To the Iglesia Ni Cristo, there is only one God, the Father in heaven. There’s also only one mediator between God and men, that is the Lord Jesus Christ, a man NOT a god” UNQUOTE
AND yet why do you call Jesus Christ LORD if he is only a man?
Why do INC believe that Jesus is only a man and yet believes in his second coming? As the BOOK of REVELATION said:
“When I caught sight of him, I fell down at his feet as though dead. 16 He touched me with his right hand and said, “Do not be afraid. I AM THE FIRST and the LAST,the one who lives.
ONCE I WAS DEAD, but now I am alive forever and ever. I hold the keys to death and the netherworld.” (CHAPTER 1:17-18)
CLEARLY,the above passage PERTAINS to JESUS since WHO WAS ONCE DEAD AND BECAME ALIVE? And why would Jesus says in the preceding verse that He is the “FIRST and the LAST” if He wasn’t DIVINE?
If you continue reading to REVELATION 2:8 -
“And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write: ‘The words of the FIRST and the LAST, who DIED and CAME TO LIFE’”
AGAIN,how can a man says he is the “FIRST AND THE LAST”?
ON the last chapter REVELATION 22:12–13 -
“Behold, I AM COMING SOON, bringing my recompense, to repay every one for what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the beginning and the end” .
AND WHO DOES INC BELIEVE WILL BE COMING SOON? Diba si Jesus? And yet why would Jesus claim He is the ALPHA & OMEGA if he was just a man?
If you do’t believe in the TRINITY,that is where the problem sets in.
because God made Jesus both Lord and Saviour!
“only man”? That’s not what the INC believe. man, yes. “ONLY” man, no.
RESBAK,so can you point to me what Church at present can proudly trace its way back to the Apostles? Since apostolic succession is very well recorded in the BiBle as Paul told Timothy,
“What you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also” (2 Tim. 2:2).
Easy! It’s the church that teaches the teachings of Jesus Christ and the Apostles. Since you quoted Timothy, here’s one teaching from 1 Timothy:
To the Iglesia Ni Cristo, there is only one God, the Father in heaven. There’s also only one mediator between God and men, that is the Lord Jesus Christ, a man NOT a god. Exactly the same as what the Apostles taught.
QUOTE FROM RESBAK:” in other words, an addition to what was taught by Jesus and the Apostles. enough said.”
YOU UNDERSTAND RESBAK. The Church was given AUTHORITY by no less than Our Lord Jesus Christ to establish days of fast and abstinence.
“Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 16:19, 18:18). The language of binding and loosing (in part) was a rabbinic way of referring to the ability to establish binding halakah or rules of conduct for the faith community. It is thus especially appropriate that the references to binding and loosing occur in Matthew, the “Jewish Gospel.” Thus the Jewish Encyclopedia states:
“BINDING AND LOOSING (Hebrew, asar ve-hittir) . . . Rabinnical term for ‘forbidding and permitting.’ . . . “The power of binding and loosing as always claimed by the Pharisees. Under Queen Alexandra the Pharisees, says Josephus (Wars of the Jews 1:5:2), ‘became the administrators of all public affairs so as to be empowered to banish and readmit whom they pleased, as well as to loose and to bind.’ . . . The various schools had the power ‘to bind and to loose’; that is, to forbid and to permit (Talmud: Chagigah 3b); and they could also bind any day by declaring it a fast-day ( . . . Talmud: Ta’anit 12a . . . ). This power and authority, vested in the rabbinical body of each age of the Sanhedrin, received its ratification and final sanction from the celestial court of justice (Sifra, Emor, 9; Talmud: Makkot 23b).
“In this sense Jesus, when appointing his disciples to be his successors, used the familiar formula (Matt. 16:19, 18:18). By these words he virtually invested them with the same authority as that which he found belonging to the scribes and Pharisees who ‘bind heavy burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders, but will not move them with one of their fingers’; that is ‘loose them,’ as they have the power to do (Matt. 23:2-4). In the same sense the second epistle of Clement to James II (‘Clementine Homilies,’ Introduction [A.D. 221]), Peter is represented as having appointed Clement as his successor, saying: ‘I communicate to him the power of binding and loosing so that, with respect to everything which he shall ordain in the earth, it shall be decreed in the heavens; for he shall bind what ought to be bound and loose what ought to be loosed as knowing the rule of the Church.’” (Jewish Encyclopedia 3:215).
Thus Jesus invested the leaders of this Church with the power of making halakah for the Christian community. This includes the setting of fast days (like Ash Wednesday).
To approach the issue from another angle, every family has the authority to establish particular family devotions for its members. Thus if the parents decide that the family will engage in a particular devotion at a particular time (say, Bible reading after supper), it is a sin for the children to disobey and skip the devotion for no good reason. In the same way, the Church as the family of God has the authority to establish its own family devotion, and it is a sin for the members of the Church to disobey and skip the devotions for no good reason (though of course if the person has a good reason, the Church dispenses him immediately).
You’re changing the subject. Ash wednesday was never celebrated, practiced, performed or even thought of by the first century Christians. It’s a pagan practices adopted by the Roman Catholic church. An addition to the scriptures that was forewarned by the Apostles.
QUOTE:”There is no mention of Ash Wednesday, the practice of it or even a semblance of it in the bible. This is also true with Lent of which Ash Wednesday is supposed to be a preparation for.”
Some claim Ash Wednesday is based on a pagan festival, but it originated in the A.D. 900s, long after Europe had been Christianized and the pagan cults stamped out.
Ash Wednesday is actually a colloquial name. The official name is the Day of Ashes, because on that day the faithful have their foreheads marked with ashes in the shape of a cross.
In the Bible, a mark on the forehead is a symbol of ownership. By having his forehead marked with the sign of a cross, a person symbolizes that he belongs to Jesus Christ, who died on a cross. This is in imitation of the spiritual mark or seal that is put on a Christian in baptism, when he is delivered from slavery to sin and the devil and made a slave of righteousness and Christ (Rom. 6:3-18). It is also imitates the way the righteous are described in the book of Revelation: “Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees till we have sealed the servants of our God upon their foreheads” (Rev.7:3). Or again, “Then I looked, and, lo, on Mount Zion stood the Lamb and with him a hundred and forty-four thousand who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads” (Rev. 14:1). This is in contrast to the followers of the beast, who have the number 666 on their foreheads or hands.
This reference to the sealing of the servants of God for their protection has a parallel passage in Ezekiel: “And the Lord said to him [one of the four cherubim], ‘Go through the city, through Jerusalem, and put a mark [literally, a tav] upon the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it.’ And to the others he said in my hearing, ‘Pass through the city after him, and smite; your eye shall not spare, and you shall show no pity; slay old men outright, young men and maidens, little children and women, but touch no one upon whom is the mark’” (Ezek. 9:4-6).
Like most modern translations, the Revised Standard Version quoted above is not sufficiently literal here. What it actually says is to place a tav on the foreheads of the righteous inhabitants of Jerusalem. Tav is one of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and in ancient script it looked like the Greek letter chi-two crossed lines like an x. It is also the first letter in the Greek word for Christ (christos). The Jewish rabbis commented on the connection between tav and chi. This is undoubtedly the mark Revelation has in mind when the servants of God are sealed with it.
The Church Fathers expounded on this tav-chi-cross-christos connection in their homilies, seeing in Ezekiel a prophetic foreshadowing of the sealing of Christians as servants of Christ. It is also part of the background of the Catholic practice of making the sign of the cross, which in the early centuries (as can be documented from the second century on) consisted of using one’s thumb to trace a small sign of the cross on one’s forehead-like Catholic do today at the reading of the Gospel during Mass.
On the first day of Lent, this signing is done with ashes because they are a biblical symbol of mourning and penance. In Bible times the custom was to fast, wear sackcloth, sit in dust and ashes, and put dust and ashes on one’s head (cf. 1 Sam. 4:12; 2 Sam. 1:20, 13:19, 15:32). Ashes also symbolize death and so remind us of our mortality. When the priest uses his thumb to sign one of the faithful with the ashes and says, “Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return,” he is echoing God’s address to Adam (Gen. 3:19; cf. Job 34:15; Ps. 90:3, 104:29; Eccles. 3:20). This phrase also echoes the words at a Catholic burial, “Ashes to ashes; dust to dust,” which is based on God’s words to Adam in Genesis 3 and Abraham’s confession, “I am nothing but dust and ashes” (Gen. 18:27).
Catholics are not required to have their foreheads signed with ashes. It is, though, strongly advised as a visible spiritual reminder that encourages us to adopt an attitude of prayer, repentance, and humility.
Neither is Ash Wednesday a holy day of obligation. Holy days are either commemorations of particular events (such as the birth of Christ), particular people (such as Jesus’ earthly father, Joseph), or important theological concepts (such as the Kingship of Christ). Ash Wednesday does not commemorate any event and could be said only indirectly to commemorate a Person (Christ), since it is the beginning of preparation for the greater celebrations of Christ’s saving work that follow. However, attending Mass is a fitting way to mark the beginning of penitential season of Lent. Also, it is a day of fast and abstinence.
why thank you! AD 900, or at least 800 years after the death of the last Apostle. in other words, an addition to what was taught by Jesus and the Apostles. enough said.
Hi bro! That’s a very timely post. Indeed, ash wednesday can not be traced from the bible.
Bro. Mel
http://MisterAtMisis.com