Sermon for Ash Wednesday
“Make me a clean heart, O God,/ and renew a right spirit within me.”
‘Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,’ as one version of a children’s rhyme puts it. Yes, but only so as to rise up. And no, it has nothing to do with the Great Plague or the Black Death. That is a meta folkloric myth or invention of the 19th century.
Dust and ashes are the symbols of the beginning of Lent. They recall us at once to creation and to repentance which has to do with our awareness of having turned away from God. As such dust and ashes belong to the idea of our turning back to God from whom in sin we have turned away. They belong symbolically and in a sacramental fashion to our seeking God’s will for our re-creation rather than remaining in separation. But it is about the seeking. That is why Lent is really the pilgrimage of love, our loves seeking the divine love which seeks our good. We seek the good which God seeks for us and which belongs to his essential nature as the All-Good, we might say. We can only seek the goodness of God for us through God’s love.
The exhortation in the Prayer Book Penitential Service is a masterpiece of doctrinal minimalism. It speaks about the custom “in the primitive Church” – a phrase which is intentionally unspecified but refers in general to the early Patristic period which witnesses to the emergence of three interrelated things: the Holy Scriptures; the Creeds, and the ascetic patterns of the Church’s life of devotion. One forgets that the books of what we mostly mean by the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, to use Christian language, were only explicitly named by St. Athanasius in a letter in the early 4th century but as bearing witness to what had been received and recognised much earlier. Thus the emergence of the Canon of Scripture parallels the establishment of what Irenaeus and others called the Rule of Faith, namely, the Apostles’ Creed, and, then the emergence of the Nicene Creed in the 4th century first at the Council of Nicaea and then at Constantinople, 325 and 387 AD respectively. What we call the Nicene Creed is properly speaking the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. Later there came into use the so-called Athanasian Creed. These are the three Creeds of the Church Universal.
All that the exhortation says in its modest way is that it was “the custom to observe with great devotion the days of our Lord’s Passion and Resurrection, and to prepare for the same by a season of penitence and fasting.” It is not only minimalist but highlights the essential features of the Gospel narratives. To put it somewhat cryptically: Just as there can be no Easter without Good Friday so too there can be no Good Friday without Easter. The accounts of the Passion which are set before us in Holy Week are only possible through the mystery of the Resurrection. And so, too, with Lent as a time of discipline. It is only possible through the radical meaning of Christ’s Resurrection which never hides or conceals the marks of the crucifixion. Indeed, as Lancelot Andrewes emphasizes rather beautifully, “Christ crucified is the book of love opened for us to read,” liber caritatis. Lent is really about our reading that book of love.
