by CCW | 5 March 2014 18:12
It will not do, especially on Ash Wednesday, to begin with anything less than the Scriptures. Oh, I know, doesn’t every preacher begin with a text from Scripture? To ask the question is to beg the question, on the one hand, and, on the other, to suggest that there is a problem. What scripture text and for what purpose, we might ask? We may realize that there are often other purposes or agendas that have precious little to do with any sort of biblical wisdom.
Ah, biblical wisdom! What is that? Does it exist? Can we speak of the Bible in any meaningful sense at all? And what does it have to do with Ash Wednesday? Because everything about this day and the season to which it invites makes no sense apart from the pageant of Scripture and, to push the point out into the open more fully, the pageant of Scripture doctrinally, that is to say, creedally, understood. That’s a tall order and yet one of the greatest importance. It is about reclaiming the very nature of our life in Christ. It belongs, we might say, to the very purpose of Lent.
Repentance. Impossible without a sense of God, the one very thing that contemporary culture within and without the Church insists on denying. Ash Wednesday is the wake-up call to what cannot be denied. It is not about some masochistic (or sadistic) way of beating up upon ourselves and others. It is about our acknowledgement of the grace of God which truly defines, governs, and rules our lives, the God “in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is [our] perfect freedom.” Not just any freedom but perfect freedom! This is the daily prayer of the praying Church and yet we are often oblivious to its power and truth.
It makes no sense to embrace the disciplines of Lent without at least a modicum of understanding of its great order. Dust, not ashes, are imposed upon our foreheads. The words of Imposition recall us to creation: “Remember O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” We are the dust into which God has breathed his spirit. We are recalled to the truth of our being as made in the image of God. The ashes are a signal reminder of how we have turned away from the one in whose image we are made. Repentance is about our turning back. “Return to the Lord, your God,” the Ash Wednesday lesson from Joel reminds us. That returning is repentance. “Return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping and with mourning.” It is very much about our hearts. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” as the Gospel reading from Matthew reminds us. What do we desire? What do we want? What do we love?
That there is a God to whom we may return is the good news that underlies all the disciplines and practices of Lent. What are those disciplines and practices that belong “to the observance of a holy Lent” to which you are invited “in the name of the Church” (BCP, p. 612)? They are “self-examination and repentance.” They are “prayer, fasting and self-denial.” They are “reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word;” in short, the very things that belong to the pilgrimage of love. They are all about God’s love perfecting our loves.
Ashes are imposed upon our foreheads in the sign of the Cross. We return to God because of the radical turning of God to us in Jesus Christ. We return in the love of the crucified who redeems us from sin and death having been “made sin for us” and “while we were yet sinners, dying for us.” All so that we might truly live and have our being in him.
It means repentance. It requires our heartfelt desire to be healed and restored within our very being. Dante, in a wonderful image in his Purgatorio, captures the joyful sense of repentance. The foreheads of the penitents are marked with seven Ps. The letter P symbolizes peccatum, meaning sin; the sevenfold Ps symbolize the seven deadly sins of our broken and fallen humanity. At the completion of their penance, each P is erased from their foreheads with the singing of an appropriate Beatitude from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.
In embracing the disciplines of Lent, as it were, the vices of our souls are being purged away and the virtues that belong to our restoration and perfection are being acquired. All by the grace of God perfecting our nature not destroying it. God’s grace is the operative principle. Ultimately the truth of our desiring is found in our wanting what God seeks for us. The Beatitudes signal the perfection of our humanity; they are the grace endued qualities of our souls.
We can return and begin again. Why? Because “he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and repents of evil.” God repents? Only in the sense that the goodness of God is always greater than all and every form of evil; only in the sense that our repentance is the effect of God’s grace recalling and restoring us to himself. “Blessed are you,” the Beatitudes remind us, in whatever condition of life we might find ourselves, because we can return to the God who turns to us in blessing. The ashes of repentance mark the beginnings of the blessings of Lent.
“Repent ye” for so shall you rejoice and be blessed.
Fr. David Curry
Ash Wednesday, 2014
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