I look forward to Ash Wednesday as one of my favorite days in the liturgical year.
That sounds strange, even morbid, but I’ve got a reason. Ash Wednesday, it seems to me, invites us to look at our finiteness, our frailty, our pain, and our death. It starts us on a 40-day journey. This journey, in many ways, is a journey to our end in the shadow of death.
“Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return” (Gen. 3:19). This message was spoken for the first time by God to Adam after he had committed sin. Each year they are repeated on Ash Wednesday by the Church to Christians to remind them of two fundamental truths—their nothingness and the reality of death.
Dust, the ashes which are put on our foreheads today, has no substance; a breath will disperse them. It is a good symbol for man’s nothingness: “O Lord, my substance is as nothing before you” (Ps. 38:6), exclaims the Psalmist.
Our pride, our egoism, needs to understand this. We need to realize that at our best, at our peak, we are nothing. We were drawn from nothing by the power of God because of His love. He desired to share some of His being and His life with us. We cannot—because of sin—heal what died in the garden of Eden without somehow traveling through the dark reality of death. Death is the consequence and punishment of sin. It is bitter and painful because of this. Nevertheless, death exists, and we should reflect on it, not to distress ourselves, but to remind and arouse ourselves to hope for more.
This understanding of death places before our eyes the vanity of earthly things and the brevity of life: “All things are passing; God alone remains.” It calls us to separate ourselves from “the world” and every earthly satisfaction and to seek God. Confronted with death, we understand that “all is vanity, except to love God and serve Him alone” (Imitation of Christ I, 1, 4).
All of this is counter-cultural and opposed to everything we’ve learned. Because of this, as a culture, we try avoiding death, grief, and any pain. Even in our churches, and among believers generally, we don’t regularly use the types of spiritual disciplines that might help us live with and through our frailties. Ash Wednesday, for one day, brings us into this world of worship and prayers of lament. We bring our brokenness to God, as many of the psalms do with raw honesty.
Lament opens the possibility of facing the doubts and questions we carry and then turning toward the face of the One who can handle them. It gives us the chance of—as our children’s Bible phrases it—seeing sad things come “untrue” again as the Kingdom breaks in.
Instead of deep-diving into the historical significance of the day itself, I wanted to talk about ashes. I know, super exciting, right? But stay with me.
What comes to mind when you think of Ash? Burning? There’s a destructive message in Ash. Its very existence means that there was the destruction of something or someone.
This destruction points to another reason behind ashes, which is grief. No matter what the cause, the presence of ashes usually points to some grief-worthy event. And this is where we leave the idea of ashes. Something terrible has happened, and now ashes exist. The sadness we feel is a reminder of that reality.
There will be seasons of your life that are ash laden. Maybe they represent failures and destruction. Or perhaps they are careers, ideas, or relationships that have burned. Maybe they represent tragedy.
I want you to know that God never meant for the ashes to be the end of the story. That’s not who He is. They are intended to be the beginning. As Ash Wednesday begins Lent, so does God make new beginnings out of what feels like endings through the work of the cross at Easter.
In moments that bring you to despair, know that God has a plan! It can be hard to see at times, but He does. Ash Wednesday reminds us of that, but it also points forward through the valley of the shadow of death to the joy to come.
Photo by Ahna Ziegler on Unsplash