“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.
The exhortation also calls attention to an equally early practice, namely how “this season of Lent … provided a time in which converts to the faith where prepared for holy Baptism” as well as a time for the reconciliation and restoration “by penitence and forgiveness” of those who “by reason of notorious sins had been separated from the body of the faithful.” It reminds us of such things to put us “in mind of the message of pardon and absolution contained in the Gospel of our Saviour.” This emphasizes “the need which all Christians continually have, of a renewal of their repentance and faith.” This is the counter to all of the false and gnostic forms of perfection. The Church is not the sect of the elect. We are in pilgrimage always as sinners seeking God’s grace. In a way the Lenten pilgrimage of love culminates in the renewal of our baptismal vows on Easter Eve. That is about our being renewed in love.
You are invited, the exhortation says, “in the name of the Church to the observance of a holy Lent.” Church here does not mean any of our denominational identities as Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Baptists, Presbyterians, whatever. It is simply “the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church” which we confess in the Creed and which is the Body of Christ. It is all about our participation in the life of Christ in his passion, death and resurrection. The forms of that participation belong to the disciplines of Lent as derived from the Scriptures about fasting and self-denial, about prayer and sacrifice, about reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word. All pretty minimalist and all scripturally grounded and well attested by the practices of the primitive Church.
There is a kind of clarity about the invitation in terms of intention and agency. For it is “by self-examination and repentance”; it is “by prayer, fasting, and self-denial”; it is “by reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word” that we are invited to observe a holy Lent and in so doing are already set in motion by the joy of the Resurrection. Such is the interplay of passion and resurrection. It is always a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God’s love and never a linear journey for that would deny the eternity of God and make an idol of ourselves and our actions, as if it was all us rather than Christ in us. As the great penitential psalm reminds us, “the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou shalt not despise.” We seek God’s grace “to make in us a clean heart and to renew in us a right spirit.” Such is our turning back to God from whom we have turned away, a turning which is nothing less than God’s Spirit at work in us.
It is not easy, Andrewes says in a remarkable homily on the Holy Spirit, to compare the incarnatio Dei with the inspiratio hominis, the mystery of the Incarnation or the mystery of our inspiration, for they are inseparable and we are not complete without both.
As we will see on Sunday, Jesus was led into the desert by the Holy Spirit to be tempted of the Devil for forty days. The temptations of Christ are our temptations but they are overcome in Christ and so by him in us. The forty days of Lent recall the exodus of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt and to the forty years of journeying in the wilderness that culminates in the learning of the Law. Those themes are picked up and intensified in the greater exodus of Christ’s going into the deeper wilderness of human sin. Such is the going forth and return of the Son to the Father in creation and recreation or redemption. It is the journey of love because it gathers us into the life of Christ and is the dynamic of his life in us. We too are led by the Holy Spirit.
All of the customs, disciplines and practices of Lent are really about our looking at the Crucified Christ. He is pierced for us, made sin for us, so that we in turn may be pierced in our hearts by his love in contrition and confession. We seek his “grace to amend our sinful lives;” in short, “to decline from sin and incline to virtue.” It is all a kind of circling, a turning back to him from whom we have turned away. The ashes are imposed on our foreheads signaling that the problem of sin lies not in our bodies but in our wills as turned away from God. They are a sign and symbol of our being turned back through the love of Christ moving our hearts and minds, so that we may be made “a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee.”
“Make me a clean heart, O God,/ and renew a right spirit within me.”
Fr. David Curry
Ash Wednesday 2023