Ash Wednesday '23
The prophet Joel’s call to fast and repent comes under the threat of an imminent invasion. Jerusalem was about to face a military conquest from a foreign power, which Joel explains is a judgment for the sins of the people. In light of these events, the call to actively turn back to the Lord was itself nothing unusual. Fasting, prayer, and almsgiving were the three most common forms of worship in ancient Israel, particularly during times of crisis. Since the time of the Judges, these corporate acts of penitence arose when the burdensome fear of an oppressor pressed down on the Israelites to the point that they cried out to be delivered, to be set free again as God had set them free in the Exodus and in the inheritance of the Promised Land. To fast in those days was to participate in a prayer that the judgment for sin would be propitiated, the enemy at the gates might be turned away, and that the people might be permitted to get back to life as God had established for them to walk in.
Too often, though, that repentance in sackcloth and ashes, in fasting and prayer, proved to be a perfunctory and temporary humility aimed at getting back to life as it had been known just before things had begun to get beyond the people’s sense of control. Their prayer was not really to return to the way of the Lord and faithfulness to the covenant but to the last point of comfort and self-possession. Communal penitence had become little more than a collective self-help project. The ceremonial fasts became a way of trying to wind back the clock of unfaithfulness and its consequences to the point where the pleasures of compromise and infidelity could still be enjoyed without any of the negative side effects. In the nuptial metaphor so common in the prophetic literature, the people wanted enough reconciliation in their covenant marriage with God to enjoy the perks of being His spouse, but also wanted to retain the ability for the occasional fling on the side.
Joel’s call to “rend the heart and not the garments” was a call for a genuine repentance, an actual sorrow for sin by each person, from the heart. Only then would the collective, ceremonial fast have substance. The call to individual repentance from the heart does not negate the call for the whole people to gather in solemn assembly; all would still be called to stop what they were doing and attend to the moment before judgment was pronounced. Faithfulness to obey the call to an inward change would make the difference as to how each person met what was to come.
Joel’s call to fast and pray, in the end, did not stop the invasion and fall of Jerusalem. There would be no more of that effort to retain a sense of autonomy from God, of performing enough ritual humility to get back to life before the crisis. The way of all things would suddenly cease as the judgment of God brought the Kingdom of Judah to an end. To fast and pray in those days led one to realize that they could not allay the disaster, they could not ‘save the world.’ To fast and pray would mean being turned back to the Lord and made able to see that in the midst of the cataclysm and the exile that was surely to follow, that the Lord was there as He always was: “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness.” To rend the heart and not the garments was to be freed to see that as the world and its devotion to sin and death were allowed to pursue its ruin, that the Lord had never stopped being faithful and would not stop being faithful to all those who remain turned to seek Him face to face.
By the time of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, another threat of invasion loomed over the post-exile people of Judea. It had been announced by the last prophet of Israel, John the Baptist, and then by the Lord Himself as He commenced His ministry, saying “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Jesus’ call to fast and repent signals that the Kingdom of God is at the gates, it is invading the world, and that all other worlds are coming to an end. Like Joel, Jesus calls the people to fast, pray, and give alms. He presumes that these are already in hand as disciplines. Yet Jesus reorients these ancient practices to a new end. No longer are they to be the outward habits of the prayer that judgment might not fall; rather they are now the disciplines which incarnate our prayer that God’s Kingdom would come and that it would come soon. Rather than turning to God as a rescuer from invasion, to pray and fast and give for the disciple now meant to welcome as the invading King the Lord who is gracious and merciful. We pray not to restore our ways of life but to renounce them that the will of the Lord might prevail and rule us.
Today we are called to join that spiritual conquest, to join the cause of the Kingdom as it invades the world and overturns all of its ways. Our fasting in Lent is not a sign that ruin is imminent, but a sign that redemption is imminent. Our penitence is a receiving of that redemption. We receive ashes today and a reminder of our death as the starting place of our Lent. We do so in order to acknowledge that there are still ways we are complicit with this world and its values. The ashes represent a world that is passing away, one that can only cause us harm insofar as we devote ourselves to it and suffer loss when it dies as it only can. The cross of ashes can only disturb those who have made their home and found their security in this world. In whatever ways that describes us, Lent now comes as a severe mercy break us free, to return us to the Lord and to find Him gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness, ready to redeem and heal us.
Ash Wednesday is not an existential crisis unless it needs to be for our salvation. We put on ashes not to be ostentatiously morose or melancholic; that is why the ashes are in the shape of the cross, the sign of the Lord’s victory over death. To receive our ashes today serves to start our experience of Lent in obedience to the Lord as we go to wash our face and appear not in these forty days before others as though we are fasting. It is a hopeful reminder that the ash of our lives can indeed be washed away if we allow it to be, and that our dustiness cannot efface the mark of our adoption as children of God. It is no accident, after all, that we receive the ashes where once we received the chrism at baptism and confirmation. Those marks are forever; we do not put ashes back on tomorrow–the ashes are fleeting.
The real challenge of Lent is to receive our ashes in our hearts as well and to seek continually in the forty days ahead for the Lord to make us clean of those ashes, to make clean our hearts within us. In whatever parts of our lives we cannot or do not yet pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” those are the places where our fasting, prayer, and almsgiving need to be directed. Those are the ashes of our lives that need to be washed away. To name and acknowledge those places where ash has collected in our hearts is to make a good confession; to welcome Jesus into those places is what it means to keep a good Lent. And that is why that while we begin this service with ashes but end with Communion. Owning the ashes, we turn to Jesus now and welcome Him in the Eucharist, to remember and experience what is the end of the Christian story: the Resurrection and the renewed Creation. And as we bear with humility the healthy shame of our dust, may we take heart in the fact that despite that dust our Lord is gracious and merciful to draw near to us, and in steadfast love to give Himself to us and for us: to make us clean, inside and out.
Lent has begun. The world is ending. As St. John the Baptist proclaimed: “Repent, and believe the Gospel.” And as our Lord said: “there will be signs in the sun, in the moon, and in the stars; and on the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them from fear and the expectation of those things which are coming on the earth, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to happen, look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near.”
