“Fat Tuesday” and “Shrove Tuesday.” Are these two concepts opposites?
It may be easy to equate the whole tradition of “Fat Tuesday” with all the excesses of Mardi Gras: too much greasy food, too much inspirited beverage, too much skin, etc. And it may be easy to think, as the righteous Anglicans we are, of “Shrove Tuesday” as it’s redeemed antithesis: prayers, sobriety, the long deep breath as we plunge into the austerities of Lent.
I contend, however, this is not so… or, at least, if it is so, that it ought not to be.
Let me do this in bullet points, or, as Fr. Chris calls things like this, “quick hits”:
“Shrove” means “to repent; to confess.” It comes to us from the medieval practice of hearing confession and receiving penance. Its root descends from the Latin scribere “to inscribe; to carve; to write down.” What happens during the office of reconciliation in the Church? The Law of God enters the life of the penitent person and God instructs his scribal deputy, the pastor, to absolve the person —to declare their sins blotted or cut-out of the record against them.
This is where we get the old phrase “to make short shrift” —the practice of offering criminals who have been served the death penalty the chance to make a final confession.
The Tuesday before Ash Wednesday IS this kind of day: a gracious gift to enter into the joy of repentance and cleansing of the heart as we prepare for Easter.
On Shrove Tuesday we clean out our hearts, and we clean out our pantries of the old leaven (cf. Ex 12:15; Matt. 16:6; 1 Cor 5:7-8). We both shrive (to make a confession) and we shrivel (to use-up the stores).
But this day is also a day of biblical fatness. “Fatness” in the Bible is a symbol of fullness, abundance, and much-ness. Set aside our current social discussion about body size, health, diets, etc. for just a minute. “Fatness” in Scripture is a position of having more than enough.
It is both a good state and a dangerous one. The Psalmist praises the Lord for “fattening” (דָּשֵׁן) his head with oil (Ps. 23:5) —not anointing (there’s another word for that —“messiah” [מָשַׁח]) — making him abundant and having things overflow. And yet, apart from God’s grace, a fattened state of abundance can become a snare, leading us away from God and into our own self-reliance. This is what Moses says will happen to Israel: “Jeshurun grew fat and kicked” (Deut. 32:15).
Christian Fat Tuesday is a celebration of abundance. God has given us much. It is a celebration of the goodness of God and of his provision.
In the face of Lent the “fat” in “Fat Tuesday” declares that “the Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.” We don’t enter into Lent as a work of supererogation —of striving to prove something to earn God’s favor. We begin in a surplus of God’s goodness. God has given us much.
All our shriving is a response to God’s fattening us. God has been good. Lest we, like idolatrous Jeshurun, forget God in our blessings, we make an annual corporate pilgrimage through repentance and fasting into greater victory.
Christian civilization tends to fall into strangeness and error when we separate the glad fatness from the sober shrivenness of the Tuesday before the beginning of Lent. Either we glory too much in the much that God has given us: either becoming, so to speak, “fattened for the kill” of sin and self and death, or we make of Lent a kind of pharisaism, a dour proving instead of a merry repenting.
Summation: Make merry and repent. Or, in another way, keep your shriving fat and your fatness shriven.