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The Presbyterian church has also been unsure about the recognition
of this day until relatively recently. Growing up in the southern
Presbyterian church, I never heard of an Ash Wednesday worship
service until I went off to college and met some Catholics.
Isn’t this a Catholic day? What is this about smearing
ashes on our foreheads anyway? How does this help us to live
as faithful Christians?
Suggested readings for the day may serve to confuse us even
further. Are we gathering for the express purpose of ignoring
what both Isaiah and Jesus tell us to do? Isaiah says, “Is
such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it
a day to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth
and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the
Lord?” And Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel, “Beware
of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by
them . . . whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the
door and pray to your Father who is in secret. . . . and whenever
you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they
disfigure their faces so as to show others they are fasting.
But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face,
so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father
who is in secret. . . .” What exactly is Ash Wednesday
about except practicing our piety and disfiguring our faces?
Why exactly do Christians gather on this otherwise unremarkable
Wednesday?
With Ash Wednesday, we enter a time of Lenten discipline,
traditionally a time of fasting and prayer in preparation for
receiving or reaffirming baptism at Easter. Fasting and prayer
can be abused, as both Isaiah and Jesus knew. Both men criticized
public piety, not because the actions were wrong but because
they were practiced for the wrong reasons. The people of Isaiah’s
day were fasting and praying to attract God’s attention.
They cried out to God, “Why do you not notice our carefully
cultivated piety?” They were fasting and praying to earn
points with God. But did this fasting enable people to change
their lives? Isaiah says to them, “Look, you serve your
own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers.”
Any piety that does not pay attention to the basic commandment
to love our neighbors is no piety at all. Isaiah’s audience
was calling out for God’s attention, but God was listening
to the cries of the hungry and the homeless in their midst.
The people to whom Jesus was speaking, on the other hand,
were fasting and praying to attract other people’s attention.
They wanted the social status that came with being good, upstanding
religious persons. They wanted points for being seen at the
prayer breakfasts. Jesus did not say “practicing piety
is unimportant.” He said, “Do not do it for public
gain.”
Presbyterians do not enter this period of fasting and prayer
to attract God’s attention or to be noticed by other people.
Lent is a way of paying attention to our own lives. We receive
the sign of the cross on our foreheads to focus our attention
on who we really are. In this way we remind ourselves that we
are bound for death—and that we are bound to the death
of Jesus Christ. Ash Wednesday and the whole of Lent provide
a time to focus our attention on the mystery at the heart of
the Christian life: that through death, the death of Jesus Christ,
we have entered new life. In our baptism, we have been joined
with Christ in death in order that we may have life eternal.
In his poem titled “Ash Wednesday,” T. S. Eliot described
“the dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying”
and “the time of tension between dying and birth.”
Eliot was talking about this day, but he was also talking about
the character of the Christian life, in which death is both
before and behind. We can frankly acknowledge our own death
ahead because in Christ that death has no more power over us.
As Paul says to the Corinthians, “We are treated as impostors,
and yet are true, as unknown, and yet are well known, as dying,
and see—we are alive.”
The paradox of Ash Wednesday, and of Lent, is that we take
on particular disciplines—fasting, prayer, service—in
order to repent and conform ourselves more closely to the life
and death of Christ, all the while recognizing that Christ has
already come to us before we sought him. This is the paradox
of the baptized life. We have been joined to Christ once, but
we spend the rest of our lives trying to live into that union.
Turning to Christ means turning also to all our neighbors
who suffer. According to Isaiah, fasting and praying that brings
us to act on behalf of these neighbors is the fast that is acceptable
to God.
As Christians receive the sign of the cross marked in ashes
and as we observe a holy Lent, we remember our baptism. We remember
that as baptized Christians, we live in the “dreamcrossed
twilight between birth and dying” but also in the “time
of tension between dying and birth.” We have already died
once. The light of the resurrection waits for us at the end
of the journey. Ash Wednesday invites us to turn again, take
up our cross, and move ahead on the way to meet the one who
shapes us, marks us, claims us as his own.
The author, Martha Moore-Keish, is Assistant Professor
of Liturgical Studies at Yale Divinity School. For more information,
contact Paul Galbreath, Associate for Worship, at
(888) 728-7228, ext. 5329, or send
him an e-mail.
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