Ash Wednesday

Readings: Joel 2:12-18; Ps 51:1-6b.12-13-14.17; 2 Cor 5:20-6:2: Matt 6:1-6.16-18

In light of what we just heard from Matthew’s Gospel, the irony of coming forward and having ashes smeared on your forehead should not be lost on you. Is it a contradiction? Is it a contravention of Jesus’s command? While it is good and right to begin the holy season of Lent by participating in Mass, it might surprise you to learn that Ash Wednesday is not a holy day of obligation.

Something else that bears noting is that the ashes you receive as a mark of your desire to “Repent, and believe in the Gospel,” while blessed last Palm Sunday, have no magical powers.¹ It is also important to point out something Jason Micheli, a Methodist minister noted this week: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” isn’t “a verse from 'Circle of Life.’ It’s not an observation about your mortality. It’s a recitation of God’s curse.”²

As a result of their disobedience, God tells Adam and Eve- “By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground, from which you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”³ You see, there is no circle of life in God’s creative plan. “Death is not natural. Death is a consequence.”⁴ As a result, Ash Wednesday is not about what all can know apart from revelation, the fact of our mortality, but what only Christians can know by revelation, that death is the wage owed to the Pharaoh called Sin.”⁵

In addition to being a mark of our desire to repent, receiving ashes is an act of hope. You see, we don’t enter into Lent pretending that Easter has not already happened. We begin Lent in the knowledge and with the assurance that Christ suffered, died, and rose from the dead to pay the debt we owe.

We are not just marked with ashes. We are marked with the sign of the cross. This tells us that “we are infinitely more than dust. We are God’s beloved, and nothing—not even death—can separate us from God’s love through Jesus Christ.”⁶

In an Ash Wednesday homily delivered many years ago, Passionist Father Harry Williams insisted that

It is a pity that we think of Lent as a time when we try to make ourselves uncomfortable in some fiddling but irritating way. And it’s more than a pity, it’s a tragic disaster, that we also think of it as a time to indulge in the secret and destructive pleasure of doing a good orthodox grovel to a pseudo-Lord, the Pharisee in each of us we call God and who despises the rest of what we are

Far from despising you, God, who reveals himself as Father through Jesus Christ, loves you. He couldn’t love you more than he loves you right now, just as you are. “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.”⁷

Have you ever had a teacher, a coach, a boss, a friend who inspires you to be a better person not by goading you or urging you to be better, let alone criticizing you in the hope you will take her criticisms to heart and change, but by loving you because you’re you, encouraging you, rooting for you? This is how friendship with Jesus works. As Saint Paul wrote to the Christian community in ancient Rome:

For Christ, while we were still helpless, yet died at the appointed time for the ungodly. Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us⁸

This is why I suggest that you subject any Lenten discipline you undertake to a threefold criteria:

1) “Is this practice going to bring me to a place of deeper preparedness for Good Friday, for Easter Sunday, for the mystery of Easter? Is it going to help me enter into this mystery a little more deeply?”
2) “Is it going bring a helpful intensity to my relationship with Christ?”
3) “will it deepen the quality of my relationships with other people, particularly those closest to me and those perhaps in pain.”⁹

Lent, as our readings indicate, is about intensifying practices in which we should be engaged all the time: prayer, fasting, and alms-giving. What about fasting? While today is not a holy day of obligation in terms of participating in Mass, Catholics are obligated to fast. Are you fasting today? If so, Why? If not, Why not?

The best reasons for fasting during Lent is to pray better and to serve others more. Hence, you should fast from those things that stand in the way of doing those things, foregoing that which inhibits your relationship with Christ and with other people, especially those closest to you and those who are suffering.

The point of Lent is not just to “be good” for six weeks or so and then return to your old way of life. The purpose of Lent is to repent in anticipation of renewing your baptismal vows at the Easter Vigil when you will be asked: “Do you renounce Satan? And all his works? And all his empty show?”¹⁰

To repent, then, means to live the new life Christ gave you in baptism when you died, were buried and rose with him to new life by the power of the Holy Spirit.¹¹ As we prepare to receive ashes as a sign of hope, may we, by the power of that same Spirit, convey that hope by walking in newness of life.

---

1 Roman Missal, “Ash Wednesday.”^↩
2 Jason Micheli, “Chocolate? Fuggedaboutit – This Lent Choose Failure”; Roman Missal, “Ash Wednesday.”^↩
3 Genesis 3:19.^↩
4 “Chocolate? Fuggedaboutit.”^↩
5 Ibid.^↩
6 Trevor Hudson, Pauses for Lent: 40 Word for 40 Days, “Day 1- Ash Wednesday”; Romans 8:38.^↩
7 1 John 4:10.^↩
8 Romans 5:6-8.^↩
9 Renovaré podcast, Trevor Hudson- “The Litmus Test for Lent.”^↩
10 Roman Missal, “The Easter Vigil,” sec. 55.^↩
11 Romans 6:4- part of the epistle reading at The Easter Vigil.^↩