So, what are we about to do here? What are about to do in the next few minutes? And here’s this Gospel. Don’t flaunt your penance. Keep you devotions to yourself. Already someone’s thinking, “Whew! When this is over, these ashes are gone.”
If you think about it though, tonight’s Gospel and ash wearing aren’t’ the only contradictions we’ve had to deal with in the past several days. For nearly two months we’ve celebrated the birth of Jesus and spoke of God’s promised fulfilled. We were enlightened once again with stories of how Jesus grew in stature, took up the Fathers mantel of ministry and proclaimed the coming of God’s kingdom. Just last Sunday we reflected on the Transfiguration. We contemplated the glorified Jesus – the Messiah, a Christ before Crucifixion. We spoke of the glory and wonder of God’s love, the magnificence, splendor and hope of resurrection, and then all of a sudden we’re looking at our own mortality, worse, our inevitable state of being. Dust we are and to dust we will return.
What the secular world would call at best a contradiction, at worse and oxymoron, the Church calls tension. It is tension between the physical world and the spiritual world. It is tension between what is and what will happen, the now and the not just yet. What we are about to do here is deliberately, intentionally face the tension between life and death knowing at the core of our being there is nothing we can do to stop the inevitable.
We are called to reflect on our lives not in light of the Glorified Christ, the Christ on the mountain we encountered last Sunday, but in the shadow of the cross. It is, in a very real sense, a deliberate form of suffering – and the outside world, the world without hope, will not understand it. Hasn’t there been enough suffering the world outside these doors ask; hasn’t there been enough tragedy in the world in last few years, over the past few decades, centuries, millennium? The Church responds this is why we take the time to suffer, so that we may become more aware of the suffering of our neighbors. We take this time to intentionally turn towards the cross so that others may see that God has not given this world up to evil tragedies and catastrophic suffering. The Father is neither an observer of pain felt by injustice, of desolation felt in loneliness nor simply a witness of devastating destruction. Remember the words of Paul we just heard. “[Y]et for our sake God made him one with human sinfulness, so that in him we might be made one with the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:21 – REB) The creator of all has not left us to the evil of this world but through the birth and life of Jesus has joined in solidarity with the world.
So, what are we about to do here – in the next few minutes? We are about to be called by the Church to a holy Lent so that we, as the Body of Christ, may share in solidarity with the victims of hunger, fear and oppression. Tonight we turn to the cross and wear ashes because we are dust. We wear ashes for a world that has nearly been drowned in the ashes of destructive forces and needs to know it has not been abandoned. As one pastor has put it, “To go with Jesus through Lent means nothing so safe and secure. It is rather to catch something of his own passion for the sick, the outcasts, the insignificant, and the condemned awaiting execution. To go with Jesus through Lent means being set free by his cross and resurrection to do more with our lives than preserve them.”
So think carefully about what you’re going to do with that little smudge on your brow after the service. If there is a core message in this evenings Gospel it’s that on this Ash Wednesday, we wear ashes not because it can save the world or us, but so that we may engage the world in God’s love; in God’s solidarity.
