Ashes, Ashes…We All Fall Down
An Ash Wednesday reflection on what we all share- fragility.
Feb 22nd, 2012 | By Skye Jethani | Category: Formation, Politics, TheologyToday is Ash Wednesday. News sites are buzzing about the Republican debate scheduled for tonight and whether the two Catholic candidates (Gingrich and Santorum) will have ashes on their foreheads. Could it be another way of reinforcing their religious credentials in a race that is quickly shifting toward social issues and away from the economy? Will it draw more attention to Romney’s Mormonism and Obama’s flub on contraception/religious liberty? We will see in a few hours.
While usually associated with Roman Catholic expressions of Christianity, the season of Lent and the symbolic display of ash on the forehead has been gaining acceptance among Protestant and Evangelical Christians as well. My own church has gathered for a “Solemn Assembly” on the Sunday evening before Lent (it wouldn’t seem right to call it Ash Sunday). The service includes reflective readings from Scripture, extensive periods of silence, confession of sins, and receiving ash on the forehead in the form of a cross.
There is often criticism that such symbolism is “too Catholic;” it violates our non-liturgical sensibilities as evangelicals. But what we often fail to see is that ash is a profoundly ancient and biblical symbol, and it predates any schism in the church between Catholics and Protestants.
In Genesis 2, when God created the man he formed him from the dust of the ground. In fact the name Adam comes from the Hebrew word meaning earth or ground. And after Adam’s sin, and the entrance of death into creation, God says to him, “for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). From this biblical root comes the well-worn funeral prayer, “ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.”
Ashes or dust came to be symbolic of mortality and death. It represents our shared human frailty and reminds us that no power we possess can help us escape the destiny that awaits us. In the Old Testament ashes were used as a symbol of mourning and repentance. It was a visual, physical acknowledgment of grief over death, sin, and evil. Job repents in dust and ashes (Job 42:6). The king of Nineveh wore sackcloth and sat in ashes when he heard the message of Jonah (Jonah 3:6). And the ashes from animal sacrifices were part of the ritual for the purification of sins (Numbers 19:9; 17).
The prophet Isaiah foresaw a day when the ashes of mourning would be replaced by “beautiful headdresses” and the “oil of gladness.” This passage, found in Isaiah 61, was quoted by Jesus at the very start of his public ministry. He entered a synagogue, opened the scroll, and read from this familiar text:
The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,
because the LORD has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;
to grant to those who mourn in Zion-
to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning…
After reading Jesus announced, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21).
The symbol of ashes on the forehead is a powerful reminder of our human weakness-both moral and physical. We are creatures of sin, prone to selfishness, greed, and all kinds of injustice. And the ash reminds us of our ultimate fate; we all live under the shadow of death and we cannot escape the grave.
But the ash, and the season of Lent in general, help us celebrate the glorious hope we have in Jesus Christ. The sins of the world have been atoned for though his death on the cross. And the grave has been overcome through his resurrection on the third day. Indeed the ashes of mourning have been replaced by the oil of gladness.
But until all is put to rights and all of creation is renewed by the Creator, it is still good to be reminded of our broken human condition. It is right for us to be reminded of our sin and be humbled by our dusty origins and certain destiny. And while some might want to make Ash Wednesday into a political story today, we need to remember that it’s not about politics. It’s about humanity, mortality, and fragility. We are all dust, and to dust we will return.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Thanks for this, I’m in a strange place between my past cynicism over liturgical traditions, which I always saw as empty growing up, and the beauty and symbolism of the early church. The last few years I have done lent with my church and have found it an excellent opportunity to slow down and focus on my personal journey instead of being so outwardly focused (for good or for ill) all the time.
It’s too bad in the wake of the polemics of the Protestant Reformation vs. the late Medieval Roman Catholic Church that many Evangelicals have lost awareness of the origins of Christian liturgy and ritual (that well predate Medieval Roman Catholicism), which are in fact in the Jewish liturgy well established in the time of Jesus. It seems to never occur to many modern Evangelicals to think about the fact that, even from the NT accounts, we know that Jesus and His disciples and then the first Christians followed the Jewish patterns of established corporate communal prayers (many of them, of course, read directly from Scripture), and the annual cycles of Feasts and Fasts commemorating God’s redemptive acts in their history, etc. But quickly and especially after the rupture with the Jews who rejected Jesus as Messiah and the Christians’ consequent ejection from the Temple and Synagogue, in addition to their weekly Christian celebration of the Agape Meal and the Eucharist after the Sabbath, formed their own distinctly Christian liturgical identity by regularly fasting on different days of the week than the Jews, establishing regular readings from the Gospel and Epistles as they became available (and not just Psalms and OT), establishing an annual cycle of Feasts (Pascha/Easter being the primary one and then others added–all relating to the events of Gospel and Church history) and Fasts (Lent came from the period for preparation of catechumens for baptism and entry into the Church). The shape of the earliest liturgies of the Church and all those still based on those have a distinct “Liturgy of the Word” (following patterns established in the Jewish Synagogue) and a “Liturgy of the Eucharist” (modeled on the Jewish Temple worship and taking a form recognizing in Jesus the fulfillment of those Temple sacrifices). Liturgy (meaning literally, “the work of the people”) is completely biblical. Indeed we know from both the Scriptures and early Christian writings such as the “Didache” that it is the norm of biblical worship “in spirit and in truth.” When I read someone who wrote, “Liturgy is not either ‘dead’ or ‘alive’: liturgy is either true or not,” this was a moment of revelation to me that the notions current in the Evangelical circles I’d been traveling regarding Christian worship were far from accurate in many cases and when they were accurate, they certainly weren’t the whole story.