Hot Cross Buns

Dear Friends,

In the year of our Lord 1361, Brother Thomas Radcliffe of St. Albans Abbey baked the first hot cross buns and distributed them to the poor on Good Friday.

In the year of our Lord 2023, Michele Miller of St. Andrew’s Church will bake not-the-first hot cross buns and distribute them to those at church on Palm Sunday.

In the intervening 6 1/2 centuries between Brother Thomas and Sister Michele, hot cross buns have become a traditional staple of the Lenten season. Over that same 600+ years, hot cross buns also became the star of the nursery rhyme, “One a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns,” though during the reign of Queen Elizabeth (the first Queen Elizabeth, in the 1500s) it was illegal to sell hot cross buns for one penny, or two pennies, or really any number of pennies, except at burials, on Good Friday, or at Christmas. As a practical matter, however, neither the nursery rhyme nor the mercantilist policies of Elizabethan England have much to do with Lent.

We will partake of hot cross buns as a way of marking the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ upon the cross and the beginning of Holy Week. The ingredients and construction of hot cross buns symbolize the cross, suffering, and burial of Jesus — all of which he did for us.

I hope you’ll make an effort to be a part of worship Sunday and over all of Holy Week as we walk through mystery and drama of our salvation story, authored by the the Lord of life himself, Jesus Christ.

In Him,
Fr. Andrew