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Pastoral Points
The season of Lent begins today with Ash Wednesday. I’ve finally accepted the apparent reality that Lent will always sneak up on me, no matter how early or late it falls. So, most years, I find myself making preparations just a little later than I’d prefer to be.
But the church’s calendar, of course, is much bigger than little ol’ me, and it’s not going to wait for my scrambling. Ready or not, it’s here.
That’s Ash Wednesday in a nutshell, though. We’re never really ready for it. This is the day in which ashes are imposed upon us. That’s a deliberate and important word choice. The ashes truly are an imposition — an inconvenience, a disruption.
The ashes imposed on us interrupt our regularly scheduled lives. They call us to put first things first and get to worship. More fundamentally, they confront us with our own mortality.
The ashes the church imposes on our foreheads are a sign of death: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The same ashes, the same words for everybody — from newborns to their great-grandparents. It’s a shocking reality to face, especially for a culture obsessed with denying death and clinging to illusions of youth and immortality.
But the ashes are not just imposed upon us as some random smear. They are carefully crafted into a cross — a shape that says just as much about death as do the ashes themselves. We will surely die, but we will die in Christ.
The cross calls to mind the entire event of Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection. The cross itself is not the end of the story. If we die in Christ, we will also live in Christ, for he has conquered death (Romans 6)!
“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? ... Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15).
