Last year’s Palm Sunday branches, withered and dry and burned into ashes – that’s what the pastors used to make smeary crosses on foreheads during Ash Wednesday services.
The solemnity of Lent begins with this tangible reminder: we are Easter people, but this is not Heaven.
This year’s ashes felt more than usually appropriate on my skin. The grit, the dirty, smudgy itch of the cruciform, etched like a bull’s eye on the shell of my brain, declared “death” within a chorus of similar declarations…
Two dear friends are burying their mothers next week.
My father is languishing in a hospital bed.
Thousands of civilians are dying in the Ukraine.
“Death” is literally everywhere I look.
The familiar injunction intoned by the pastor:
“Remember you are dust, and unto dust you will return.”
I wanted to respond:
“Obviously!”
On reflection, this is one more instance when the words of 20th century prophet C.S. Lewis apply:
War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice… We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal… But there is no question of death or life for any of us; only a question of this death or of that—of a machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty years later. What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased… Yet war does do something to death. It forces us to remember it… War makes death real to us: and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right.
C.S. Lewis, “Learning in Wartime” (1939).
The typically concise diagnosis Lewis offers here is off in one respect: we have been forced to remember death, daily, globally, for several years now. The present war turns up the volume on a shriek that has been echoing since early 2020. “Awareness of our mortality” circa 2022 is therefore less a virtuous imperative and more a drearily relentless default.
The inevitability of the end of this life – unmistakably demonstrated in everything from a viral pandemic to the shelling of residential neighborhoods – is a settled fact for all of us. But the nature of this life – the purpose of it, the hope (or hopelessness) in which we live it – neither Covid nor Russian tanks have anything to say to that. They are equally mute about the what-happens-next, after the inevitable death by whatever means.
Thinking about death exclusive of those issues of life in the now and in the hereafter is thinking in terms of dead ends. But Ash Wednesday provides the corrective muddled thinking about death.
Indeed, Ash Wednesday points the way out of the impasse.
“Remember you are dust and to dust you will return.”
Nothing original or powerful there.
But then, “Repent, and believe the gospel.”
And everything changes.
Everything.
Because “repent” takes this life and transforms it into an active, purpose-redolent, missional endeavor.
And “the gospel” establishes the fact of the life to come and the “good news” that Jesus Christ is preparing a place for us, with Him, for forever.
Ash Wednesday acknowledges the pitfalls of death-thinking without repentance and the gospel; Ash Wednesday spells out in symbols the difficulty of repenting and believing while still in these death-bound bodies. The symbolic accuracy of the ashes-crosses can be a Life-giving beginning…
Consider the truths Ash Wednesday’s ashes spell out:
When we cut ourselves off from the True Vine, we wither –dry as old palm branches.
In this fallen world, we often see our hopes and dreams burn into ash and nothingness.
We journey from dust to dust, daily dying to something – to ourselves and toward Jesus, on good days; but on bad days, it’s hard to tell.
I think it was Timothy Keller who pointed out that we will always worship something, because we were made to worship – but that where Jesus offers us His blood as our covering, every other idol demands our blood for theirs.
The daily deaths can leave us mangled, anemic, broken.
But… Lent does not leave us where we are on Ash Wednesday because God did not leave us to die.
Ash Wednesday reminds us that we are dirty and lost, but then offers us a 40-day passage to cleansed wholeness, to Jesus’s resurrected holiness.
We begin with ashes made of old things, but we head into the New Thing that Jesus promises to make for us – to make of us!
This year, perhaps more than any other year of my life, I needed those ashes to remind me… not to remember that I am dust, but to remember that I am MORE than dust – that life is MORE than death – that the gospel is the Good News for every single day, now and throughout eternity.
So, I received the ashes and the admonition to remember.
But I received, too, the promise and the Promise-Keeper. He defeated death. He makes Life from dust. He is with us, for Lent and for Easter and forever.