Christ's Ascension: superabundant presence

Acts 1. 1-11; Psalm 47, 32-35; 1 Pet 4.12-14; 5.6-11; Jn 17.1-11

The story of the Ascension, where the risen Jesus takes leave of his disciples and is taken up into heaven by God, can be found only in Luke, the Gospel, and in The Acts of the Apostles.  You will not find the story in Matthew or John, and the reference to an ascension in Mark 16 comes from a very late manuscript which almost certainly relies on Luke’s account.  So the Ascension belongs to Luke.  It is his story.  But why does he tell us the story at all, where the other gospel writers do not?  And why does he think it so important that he tells it not once, but twice—once at the end of his Gospel and once in Acts?  These are questions I’d like to consider today.

One very modern reading of the Ascension is actually a rather distressing story, because it appears to both repeat and fulfill a story that has become very familiar in our modern age: the one about a God who deliberately takes his distance from those who need him, and who, in the end, abandons his people to their own powers of survival.  Even the Church sometimes reads the story thus.  On the television and in the press you will today hear religious voices, voices claiming to speak for the Church, who will tell you that God has indeed left us.  Because there is no longer any authoritative teacher amongst us, they say, we must each of us invent our spirituality, invent our morality, invent our religious practices.  Because Christ has taken leave of us, because God is either dead or permanently absent, we have no alternative except to accept responsibility for our own destinies, to assume the mantel of godhood ourselves. We are condemned, as it were, to a freedom without God.  

In his influential book, After God: the future of religion, the Cambridge philosopher Don Cupitt argues that from now on we must view Christian faith as a fictional novel which human beings, alone, have authored.   In this thoroughly modern schema, Luke’s Ascension story is cited as a one of the primary figures of divine abandonment.  First, God dies with Christ on the cross.  Then he appears as an illusory flash of memory and wishful thinking in the resurrection.  Finally, he disappears entirely into a cloud of superstitious obscurity at the Ascension.  And what of the Spirit that Christ promised, the Spirit who would come to us after he had gone away?  To the modernists, this “Spirit” is just another word for the spiritual life we invent in God’s absence.  The Spirit is our invented meaning-structures, something like a collective unconscious in which we collect the stories we have written to rescue ourselves from absurdity. 

Well, how ought one respond to such thinking?  Perhaps like this.  First, it is important to recognise the legitimacy of the experience from which it arises.  For many folk, Christ has indeed left the stage.  A Catholic friend recently told me she has stopped going to church because of the abuse of children by priests.  She couldn’t understand how a Church full of the Spirit of Christ could allow such a thing.  For her, any residual sense of Christ’s presence in the world has now disappeared.  And who can blame her, or any of the victims of abuse or repression, for seeing things like that?  Certainly not me!  Yet, today I would bear witness to another way of reading the Ascension story, and, as a consequence, another way of understanding the experience of abandonment.  For there is a bigger story here in Luke’s account, and I believe that if we can only allow ourselves this enlarged vista, then even the very real ‘fact’ and ‘experience’ of divine abandonment will turn out to be something other than what it appears to be.

Let me summarise what Luke has to say like this.  While, by virtue of the Ascension, Christ is indeed no longer present as a particular human being who occupies a particular place and time, he is nevertheless, also by virtue of the Ascension, more abundantly present and active than he has ever been before.  And this not as some kind of ghostly presence who hangs in the air but never takes form.  No, says Luke, Christ is now present as the material body of Christian believers, brought into being and inspired by the very Spirit that made Jesus who and what he was.  The Spirit now makes the Church what Jesus of Nazareth was, so infusing and shaping its life and work that the mission of Jesus continues in the Church as a real and tangible Christ-presence for the world.  

If Luke were here today, I think he would say that the modernist use of his story seriously neglects some of the crucial details.  There is certainly a withdrawal of the divine presence here.  Christ is taken from the community into heaven.  But it would be premature and reductionist to then assume that the gap, the emptiness left by God’s withdrawal, may be filled only by the activity and imagination of human beings.  Now, I want you to listen carefully, because this next bit is a little tricky.  Presence is not, as the moderns insist, simply about being able to see and touch things in such a way that we can get our heads around them, to so imagine things that they take on an objective solidity that we can measure and put boundaries around.  Presence is not, as the philosopher Edmund Husserl claimed in 1913, something which human beings make and cause to appear by the power of their thinking.  On the contrary!  Following Luke, I put it to you that presence is more properly what is given us in the resurrection and ascension of Christ - the irreducible power and authority of the Other (exousia in Greek), a presence which so exceeds and overwhelms our powers of comprehension that when God visits us, while we know he has done so, but we are left powerless to explain how or why.  Even to ourselves.  Why?  Because the Other is a strong and passionate love that takes hold of us completely, body and soul, covering and surrounding us like baptismal water, entering our lungs as if to drown us.  In a repetition of the death and resurrection of Christ, our human powers are put to death, our powers to know things, to objectify and use other people, to control who and how God would be.  We suddenly find ourselves dispossessed of even our power to picture what God is like.  So much so, that we imagine that God has abandoned us.  We flounder, we struggle, we suffer terribly.  We feel that God has left the theatre, and we are left alone with nothing but a forlorn hope.  We despair.  We die . . .  But that is not the end.  Finally, this Other arrives in our bodies as the power of a new life, life lived on a plane hitherto unimagined, life lived in communion with the God who is love.  In that power, we are commissioned and sent to bear witness, not to the power of this presence in our lives, but to the power of our lives in this presence, a presence forever marked now by the sacred names of “Christ,” “Spirit,” “Love”.

Whew!  Let me try and say all that in another way.  In the wake of the Ascension, Christ remains present to us, but this presence is of a different order.  It is what Jean-Luc Marion calls a ‘saturating presence,’ a presence which so pervades and infuses the world with God’s glory that it confuses and dazzles our limited imaginations.  Ever heard the expression “He couldn’t see the wood for the trees”?  It’s like that.  While we may not be able to pin Christ down to a particular bodily form and draw borders around him which define where he is an where he isn’t, he is abundantly, even super-abundantly, present in material realities that we encounter everyday:  in the body which is the Church, past, present and future; in the bread and wine broken and poured out for the life of the world; in the Scriptures read and preached; and in the stranger, the widow and the orphan we are called to meet in our ministry of care.  Christ is ascended to the Father so he can be “everywhere present”.  

But how, I hear you ask, does this presence really address our sense of God’s absence?  What good is a superabundant presence if it dazzles our eyes so much that we cannot see that Christ is with us?  Here we turn, for a moment, to John’s Gospel.  We read there a prayer of Jesus for the Church, which comes as the end of a long conversation which John stages at the Last Supper before Jesus is crucified.  It is a conversation about how the disciples will cope when Jesus has gone.  As with Luke, John does not portray Jesus’ imminent disappearance as a withdrawal of presence, pure and simple.  In a profoundly paradoxical statement in chapter 14.28, Jesus says to his friends “I am going away; but I am coming to you”.   Hear that?  “It is by going away that I will come to you”.  For John, the going away is exactly what is needed in order to accomplish a more profound communion with Jesus than was ever before possible, a communion which echoes and redoubles the love which Jesus already shares with his Father.   For Jesus will now come in the Spirit to gather his people into the divine presence by the power (exousia again) of the Name which is “I Am”, the divine name, which signifies here a participation with Jesus in that sacrificial giving and receiving of divine love which we call, in shorthand, the Trinity.  It is a participation which goes way beyond knowing and seeing, or even imagining.  Love, you see, does not cling to the thoughts and images by which we would normally try to master each other.  Love surrenders to the invisible gaze of this other who can neither be seen nor objectified, and learns to do the same by way of return.  Love surrenders itself, as Christ surrendered his self. And in surrendering, it finally abandons its sense of abandonment.  

I conclude with this.  The Ascension is for Christians both a fact and a promise.  The fact is this: that Christ is everywhere present as the authority and power of God, a power which before and behind us, a power which forever seeks our surrender to God’s love.  And here is the promise:  if we will first discipline ourselves, through prayer, to discern Christ’s presence in the midst; and if we will then surrender ourselves to his transgressive love, body and soul; then that wound of abandonment which haunts every human being will ultimately find its healing.  For Christ has not left us as orphans.  He comes to us tangibly and bodily every day, to love and care for us as only God knows how.  If only we will recognise and surrender. 

Garry Deverell

Christ is risen to heal the world

Texts: Romans 6.3-12; Matthew 28.1-10

Tonight we celebrate the resurrection of the crucified Jesus, an event that - in the faith of the church – bears no comparison or analogy within the ordinary space and time of this world.  It is an event that has happened only once, and will never happen again in exactly the same way.  The resurrection is so unique, in fact, so singular in its eventfulness, that we are able to say a lot more about what it is not, than we are about what it is.  That’s just how it is when God decides to change world.  The old rules no longer apply, even the laws of biology or physics, and suddenly what we thought we knew turns out to be wrong!

Amongst the many things that the resurrection is not, for example, is a resuscitation of the dead body of Jesus.  We know this because, according to the eye-witnesses, the risen Jesus’ body does not behave like a re-animated body should. It can change its basic appearance, so that even the closest friends of Jesus do not recognise who he is. It can appear and disappear from sight, at once here and then somewhere else in an instant. It can walk through walls. It can even ascend into the air.  Resuscitated bodies don’t do that stuff.

Another thing that the resurrection is not, is a moment of re-birth or re-turn in the cycle of life as we know it.  This may be bad news for those of you who take Bunnies and eggs to be legitimate symbols of ‘Easter’.  Because actually they are symbols of a certain kind of Easter, the pagan ‘Easter’, the Easter that is named after the Anglo-Saxon goddess of fertility, Oestre.  This Easter celebrates, and is actually all about the turning of the agricultural seasons through autumn, winter, spring and summer.  This Easter is about the re-birth of light and life and fertility after a long fallow, enwombed, winter.  It is the Easter that the ancient Christian missionaries sought to overcome, but never did, because here we are in the midst of a bunny-and-egg obsessed culture in the southern hemisphere, which celebrates such things according to the northern agricultural cycle!  Such is the strength of the pagan myth!

Enough, then, of what the resurrection is not.  Allow me to explore something of what the resurrection is.  Tonight's gospel reading shows us that in the face of the resurrection of Christ, the theologian must become a poet.  When he speaks of the resurrection, Matthew does not speak of the thing itself, but only its effects.  This is to invoke what the English poet, Percy Shelley, called ‘negative capability’, the capability of a event that we cannot directly see, touch, taste, smell  or hear, to nevertheless produce effects that we can sense and interpret.  In Matthew’s account, the resurrection is something that happens in the dead of night, the dead of this night (but without the benefit of coal-fire electricity and street lamps).  The darkness represents an event that cannot be witnessed directly, like a nuclear explosion, or the implosion of a vast star into a tiny singularity.  Matthew wants to insist, nevertheless, that the event is very real and that its effects are profound.  That is why he invokes the image of the Angel who brings lighting and an earthquake to unlock the tomb and let the dead Christ free; that is why he speaks of an Angel who is, himself, bright, swift, and devastating as lightening.  The Angel is an image from Jewish apocalyptic literature, a literature that seeks to bear witness to things hidden since the foundation of the world, to represent, though the hyperbolic devices of poetry, the revolutionary action of a God whose actions so fundamentally change the rules that whatever rules we are working with are for ever playing catch-up.

Let us then, like Matthew himself, confine ourselves to speaking of the risen Jesus in terms of his revolutionary effects. The first thing to say is that Jesus is risen to trans-value every value, to re-value, in fact, every thing and every person that is considered mere rubbish by the powers that rule our world. Christ is raised to go before us into Galilee, the Galilee of where we happen to live, the Galilee of Melbourne, shall we say.  Christ is risen to effect in that Galilee a revolution of values whereby those who are called ‘sinners’ become saints and those who are called ‘saints’ or ‘models of virtue’ are shown, in fact, to be sinners.  Christ is risen to give life and worth to anyone generally considered to be either ‘dead’ or ‘worthless’, like aborted babies and the severely disabled, locked away from public view (as they are) in institutions, in order to protect the general public from distress.  Christ is risen to reveal that the many who claim to be  really ‘alive’ and living the good life are already dead, dead inside, living only on the phantasmal power of their insatiable desire and wishful thinking.   Christ is risen to raise the least important people of all, whether they are children or seekers of asylum or whatever, to membership in the royal household of God.  Christ is raised to shine a light on the so-called ‘leaders’ who rule it over us, to show that their care, in far too many cases, is only for themselves.  Christ is risen, finally to reveal that many whom this world considers wise (Richard Dawkins comes to mind) are nothing more than ranting fools, while the so-called ‘fools’ of this world, those who live out a simple faith in the God who is love, are actually wiser than any mind can measure or equation can tell.

Even more than this, Christ is raised to create a new world, a new universe.  Christ is raised to effect a revolutionary transfiguration in the very cosmos we inhabit.  His crucified and risen body straddles, you see, both this universe - the universe think we know - and the new creation to come that God has promised.  Through his body broken on the cross, Christ has opened a conduit, a portal if you like (you Harry Potter fans, you), into this new cosmos, where the rules have been changed so that the power to kill and to break, to maim and destroy, has been rendered as nothing.  There, it is only the love of God shown in this crucified Son that prevails.  In this perspective, the day of resurrection is simultaneously the last day of this creation, and the first day of a new creation.  What happens now is that the new will unfold within the old, until this world has finally fulfilled its purpose: to find sons and daughters for the God who is love.

Note that while the portal has indeed been opened in the risen body of Crucified, the purpose was never to suddenly transport us to that world - immediately and instantaneously - but to create, instead, a colony of witness in this world for the world that is coming but has not yet arrived.  That is what Matthew’s talk of evangelism is about.  You know, the woman being sent to tell the men, and the men being sent, with the women, into Galilee to wait for and bear witness to the resurrected Christ.  ‘In the resurrection of Jesus the new creation has indeed arrived’: that is the substance of their message.  But there is more.  ‘To everyone who believes in our message, Christ will grant a key to the portal of life, that everyone who believes may experience the liberating power of the new creation, even before it has fully arrived!’  This is the promise of the risen Christ to all who would believe.  To every soul who is willing to die with Christ to the hateful values of this world and its values.   To every soul who would submit to Christ’s teaching and allow his or her self to be undone by it.  To every soul who is willing to be broken and remade after the image of the Crucified. Christ is risen, friends, to do nothing less than heal and transform both our selves and our world into a place of goodness and beauty. A world like the one that is to come.

That he does so in a mysterious and rather hidden way goes with the territory.  For the story of Jesus told by Matthew is not, in the final analysis, the story of two worlds, one that comes before the resurrection and one that comes after.  It is the story of an ordinary and not particularly powerful man who is always already - from the beginning of the story to its end - a visitor from the new creation, whose only power is the power of love.  If he was to take Galilee or Melbourne or anywhere by storm, with weapons and armies to effect his will in a campaign of shock and awe, this would be to contradict everything that his Father, the God who is love, is on about.  Instead, in the gospel story, he takes a route at once more subtle and far more powerful: the strange and hidden way of friendship, servanthood and loving sacrifice.  And we who have died with him in baptism are called to do exactly the same: in every thought, in every deed, in every relationship, in every moment; trusting not to the power of this world, the power of our ferocious self-protection or self-interest, but to the hidden power of self-giving love that flows from God’s future, through the portal of Christ’s crucified and risen body, into the hands, the feet, the faces and the voices gathered thus on this night of revolution.  To the church, which is Christ’s very body - crucified and risen, like him, for the healing of the world. 

Christ is risen.  Hallelujah!

Holy Week and the Great Three Days of Easter - an introduction for the uninitiated

Christianity’s most important festival occurs each year in Holy Week (sometimes called 'passiontide') and the first day of the Paschal (Easter) season. Beginning with Palm/Passion Sunday, Holy Week commemorates the last week of Jesus’ life. Through a series of public services of worship, Christians everywhere join with Christ as he enters Jerusalem, shares a last meal with his disciples, is arrested, tortured, crucified and buried. Finally, at the Easter Vigil - which takes place sometime after sundown on the evening of Holy Saturday - Christians all over the world gather to celebrate Christ’s resurrection and renew their baptismal promises to follow Christ faithfully.

Palm/Passion Sunday

There are two parts to this opening service of Holy Week. The first part is familiar to most Protestants. It is the Liturgy of the Palms, commemorating the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem to cries of ‘hosanna’ and the waving of palm branches. The second part of the service is not, perhaps, so familiar. The Liturgy of the Passion is a reading of the whole story of Christ’s suffering and death, which might be interspersed with the extinguishing of candles to symbolise the ebbing away of Christ’s life. Because the service is best completed in almost total darkness, the darkness at the moment of Christ’s death, many gather for this service in the evening.

Maundy Thursday

The Maundy Thursday service commemorates the last supper Jesus shared with his disciples. According to John’s gospel, Jesus took a servant’s towel at the evening meal and washed his disciple’s feet. He did this to show that he had come amongst them as a servant, and that they, too, were called to serve one another. In memory of this event, the liturgy gives opportunity for the worshippers to wash each other’s feet. Afterwards, worshippers share a supper of bread and wine together, in thanksgiving for that first supper or 'eucharist' Jesus shared with his friends. The service is completed with a reading of Psalm 22, which is all about being betrayed by a friend and how an experience like that can cause a person to feel betrayed by God as well. While the Psalm is being read, the church is stripped of all colour and light. In this way, worshippers are prepared to walk with Jesus to Gethsemane, where Jesus is betrayed by his friend Judas through the bitterness of a kiss.

The Maundy Thursday service should not be regarded as an event that stands on its own. It is part of one great act of worship that lasts for three days, in a multi-service rite known as the Paschal Triduum, or Great Three Days of Easter. For that reason, there is no blessing or dismissal at the end of the Thursday event. Instead there is the simple expectation that all will gather again for the events of Great Friday.

Good (and Great) Friday

There are two kinds of service on Good, or Great, Friday. The first, an ecumenical 'Stations' or 'Way of the Cross' procession, has its origins in a private devotional practices from fourth century Rome. There the journey of Christ to Golgotha, carrying his cross, was commemorated by a rhythmic movement of walking, reading and prayer. Today it has become a means by which separated churches may come together to publicly share their sorrow at Christ’s death. An ecumenical Way of the Cross is often planned for the late morning of Good Friday.

The second service of Good Friday may best be celebrated at 3pm, in memory of the hour of Christ’s death (Matt 27.45). This second component of the paschal Triduum incorporates a reading of the story of Christ’s death, a series of ‘reproaches’ as from God the Father towards a world that would crucify his son, and a final movement of silent prayer that is known, traditionally, as the ‘veneration of the cross’. Here a great wooden cross is laid on the floor of the church and people are invited to stand or kneel before it, to touch the cross and offer their prayers of penitence and thanksgiving for Christ’s great sacrifice. Many church traditions have no eucharist on Good Friday because the period between the Supper on Thursday evening and the Easter Vigil on Saturday evening is a fast.  In those churches that cannot abide a fast, the eucharist is sometimes celebrated silently, or in an abbreviated form, using the blessed symbols from the night before.  In any case, this service can be very, very moving. Again, there is no dismissal or blessing at the end of the service. Instead, the participants are invited to continue their worship at the final component of the Triduum, The Great Vigil of Easter.

Great and Holy Saturday (The descent to Hell)

The Western Church has always been a little perplexed about what to do with Holy Saturday, and especially the notion from 1 Peter 4.1-8 that Christ, upon dying, went 'in the Spirit' to all those trapped in the underworld who had not heard the gospel and preached to them that they, like the liviing, might repent.  Again, one should not take such accounts as 'history' but as theology. Peter wants us to know that the gospel is preached to all creation, from its heights to its depths, and all people are called to make a response.  One way to celebrate these themes is to meet on the morning of Holy Saturday around a cross that is layed on the ground with a burial shroud over it. The service then takes the form of morning prayer, except the psalms, prayers and canticles are taken from 'Matins for Great and Holy Saturday' in the Eastern tradition.

The Great Vigil of Pascha (Easter)

The Great Vigil is the most important service of the Christian year because it celebrates what, for Christians, is the central event in human history, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The service begins sometime between sundown and dawn with a 'Liturgy of Light'. Worshippers gather outside the church around a fire from which a new Paschal candle is lit. The Paschal (Easter) candle is a symbol of Christ’s resurrection. It burns in the church every Sunday during the fifty days of the Easter season to remind us that Christ is risen.

Following behind the raised candle, worshipers then process into a darkened church where they are seated for the 'Liturgy of the Word', a reading of selected passages from the whole history of God's dealings with humankind. As each reading passes, the worshippers say a prayer and light a new candle. The church gets gradually brighter. At the final reading, an account of the resurrection, all the lights go on, the Easter banners are unfurled, and the congregation rises to sing a joyful song of praise to the God who alone is able to give life to the dead.

What follows is a 'Liturgy of Baptism', in which catechumens who have long been preparing to embrace Christ are finally welcomed into the church through baptism, a washing with water in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Rising from the water, each new Christian is annointed with oil, as a sign that God's Spirit has now taken up residence in their lives as advocate and guide. Ideally, a bishop can be present to say the prayers of 'confirmation' over them before all the other worshippers - those already baptised - renew the vows made at their own baptisms or confirmations: to turn from evil and to follow Christ, and to live in the faith of the church. The congregation is sprinkled with water as a sign of renewal in that vocation and mission.

Finally, worshippers share the 'Liturgy of the Lord’s Supper' as a sign that Christ is for ever amongst his people as the crucified and risen one, feeding and nurturing them for their mission in the world. The newly baptised joyfully receive the supper for the very first time! A blessing and dismissal indicates that the Paschal Triduum is now over. At this point, the champagne often flows very freely indeed!

Feast of the Resurrection (or Pascha)

A morning service on Easter Day can be relatively informal. Because many worshippers will have been up late the night before, this service may be built around a breakfast meal of bread, fish and wine. This mode of doing thing commemorates St. John’s account of the appearance of the risen Jesus to seven of his disciples on the beach of Lake Galilee where they were fishing (Jn 21). Worshippers may be invited to bring some bread, fish and wine (or grape-juice, if you prefer) to share with others. The service includes the ancient greeting ‘Christ is risen: He is risen indeed!’ and there are stories, prayers and Easter hymns aplenty. This is a morning of great joy and celebration at the new hope of resurrection. The celebrations continue over the next 50 days until Pentecost, which commemorates the giving of the Spirit of Christ at his ascension to the right hand of his Father. This is the season par excellence for the celebration of baptisms and various ceremonies of renewal in faith.

A final word about 'Christian' and 'Pagan' versions of Easter

You may have noticed that there is no mention in any of these specifically Christian forms of Easter worship of either eggs or bunnies. Some may find that surprising. In fact, the celebration of Easter using eggs and bunnies owes far more to pre-Christian Europe than to Christianity. The pagan celebration of Easter was essentially about the turning of the seasons from the dark of winter to the brightness of spring and the new harvest this would make possible. For pagans Easter was, and is, essentially a celebration of the returning fertility of the earth every year at springtime. In this context, symbols of fertility such as eggs and rabbits make perfect sense.

The Christian Easter celebrates something rather different, however. For Christians, the risen Christ is not simply another version of the 'Corn King' (C.S. Lewis' phrase) - a god or goddess who returns to life when the earth has been warmed by the spring sun in order to bless the fertility of the earth and guarantee a successful harvest. Christ is not, in this sense, an 'eternal return' (Nietzsche) of that which we have come to expect on an annual basis: the eternal fecundity of the earth, and a symbol of our endless capacity to become what we have always expected we can become as human beings. No. Christ is something more than this. Christ is the arrival, within human history, of something which neither nature nor history could produce on its own, from its own cycles or resources, as it were. Christ is the arrival of something genuinely new: a new idea, a new creation, a new way to live.

For in Christ, so Christians believe, God has acted to liberate human beings from the despair of their eternally cyclic imaginations. To the cry of the wise: 'there is nothing new under the sun', God poses not a confirming answer but an eternal question: 'What kind of world would be made if you abandon yourselves, your resources, your imaginations and allow yourselves to be re-made - from the outside in - in the image of this human being from another time and place, this Christ?' For what does the risen Christ mean, for Christians, if not the arrival within the possible of that which is not, strictly, possible: life, where there was only death; light, where there was only darkness; peace, where there was only conflict; hope, where there was only despair; purpose and vocation, where there was only accident? For Christians, then, the resurrection of Christ is nothing less than the contradiction of every expectation built on the principle of the 'eternal return'. It is the shattering of every pattern or model built on what has happened before. It is the beginning of a future which is genuinely new, genuinely revolutionary. SO new, SO revolutionary that we can barely glimpse its import.

For me, that is good news. Because I am tired of iterations that never solve anything, answers that simply confirm what we already think we know, solutions that never really worked in the first place. It is the good news that it is God who can save us. We are no longer condemned to save ourselves.

A holy Passiontide and joyful Paschal season to you all!

Can These Bones Live?

Texts: Ezekiel 37.1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8.6-11; John 11.1-45

As Ellie Wiesel and his companions watched, the German guards led a young boy to the gallows. He was well-known to them all. A sprightly lad with a quick sense of humour. His presence had done much for their flagging spirits of late. But now their humour was gone altogether, and a sickness of heart gripped the whole company. The boy had stolen a loaf of bread. He was to be executed for his trouble, and the whole population of the concentration camp was being forced to watch. As the noose was placed about the boy's neck, Ellie heard a whispered question, 'Where is God now?' And that, my friends, is a question that I often ask myself. 'Where is God now?' Where is God for all those Africans whose lives are being stolen away by war and famine? Where is God for the street kids of Columbia, whose parents abandon them to hunger and disease and a culture of violence? Where is God for we Indigenous people, whose land and stories and children was taken away without our consent or permission, whose lament can never be stilled? Where is God?

Ezekiel must have been asking the very same question as he looked out over the people of Israel following their exile to Babylon. He imagines Israel as a standing army - once glorious in battle, but now defeated absolutely. In Ezekiel's vision, this people once chosen by God lie dead across a whole valley. Their bones are dry and white in the sun. Even the sounds of mourning have passed away. There is no sound but that of emptiness, that thin whisper which says 'Our life is dried up, our hope is lost, we are cut off from God completely'. That note of national despair finds its echo in the more personal story of Lazarus of Bethany. Lazarus is a man greatly loved by his family and respected in the community. Suddenly, in the prime of his life, he becomes ill and dies. And note this. While Lazarus' sisters and the whole community mourn, Jesus, the very face of God in this story, is nowhere to be seen. He remains in another town, a long way off.

I must confess to you, my friends, that sometimes when I am in pain or despair I feel as though God does not care. But, more often, I wonder whether God can actually do anything about our pain. Oftentimes, even as I go about my duties as a Minister of the church and representative of Christ, I find myself wondering whether God may, in fact, be impotent. Perhaps God does care, perhaps God cares a great deal. But it may be that God can't do anything about it. Maybe God brought the world into being, but now is helpless to change its course. Maybe God had good intentions, but the whole thing just got out of hand. Most of the time, my friends, I have absolutely no problem believing in the reality of God's love. As I gaze at the image of the crucified Christ, I know in my heart that God suffers out of love for the whole damned creation. But frankly I wonder if God has any power to turn things around. I wonder if Christ may still be crucified, if God may be as dead and impotent as Nietzsche suggested.

But when I begin to think this way, when I begin to think that all is hopeless and lifeless, that line from Ezekiel comes to mind, 'Mortal, can these bones live?' I hear the question as a challenge to the despairing vision of my personal perspective. And I am reminded that my personal vision is extremely limited, that there is a supreme arrogance in writing things off so easily. When Martha meets Jesus on the road to Bethany, Jesus tells her that Lazarus will rise again. Martha brushes his comment off by reciting a line from the official doctrine of the Pharisees, 'Of course, Master, he will rise again with all the righteous at the last day'. But Jesus immediately challenges the limited nature of her vision. He talks of himself as the 'resurrection and the life' and declares that any who believe this will never be defeated by the powers of death, even in the midst of this life. 'Do you believe this?' he asks Martha. And this is Jesus' challenge to all of us.

Do you believe that the dry bones around you, or within, can live? Do you believe that God has the power to not only love us but to save us? Such belief is rare, I think. And it is rare because of the ways we are taught to see. Psychologists talk about a condition known as learned helplessness. Most people who believe that they can never progress beyond a despairing situation in which they find themselves, have learned that belief from their parents or other significant people in their lives. The children of alcoholics, for example, learn that they can never face a difficult challenge without the aid of a drink. But, of course, the drink eventually robs them of the capacity to face any situation. At another level, most of us have been taught to be passive and helpless as members of our society. Though we live in a democracy, and we are all proud of the freedom we have, very few of us ever exercise that freedom by resisting government policy or setting up ways of life which go against the flow of 'normal' social commerce. We have all been lulled into thinking that we are powerless to change anything. In the face of big business and big government, what can we do?

The reality, of course, is that things can be different. It's not only government or big business or big personal hurdles which stop us. It's what we believe. Do you know why I set aside time everyday to read the Scriptures and pray? Not because I ought to as a Christian. Not because I am a minister. I pray because I believe in a God who brings life to the dead. In that sacred half-hour, I read the stories of God in the Bible, and I wait for God to show me the ways to hope and resurrection in the midst of my own despairing reality as well as that of the communities in which I am engaged. In that little room, I wait for God like the Psalmist waits for the morning. And God indeed comes to me. God lifts me up. God renews me in hope, and fills me with visions for a better day.

Do you believe that these bones can live, my friends? When Jesus had done with weeping, he showed the power of his love by commanding the dead Lazarus to come forth from his tomb. And, blow me down, he did!  Against all reason, all expectation, all predication or calculation . . . Lazarus came forth! The dead man lived! Now, listen carefully. This is not a story about God's liberation at the end of time. It is not primarily about the hope of resurrection for all who die in the righteousness of Christ. Those stories, with that intent, come later in this gospel.  This, however, is a story about here and now. It calls us to believe in a God who brings life to the dead in the midst of our present lives, in our present stories, here and now. Do you believe the promise of God, my friends? Do you believe that God’s Spirit can come from the North and the South, from the East and from the West, to breathe new life into defeated bones? I do. Not smugly, and not triumphantly, I hope that’s clear! My belief is hard won, and I need the constant discipline of prayer to retain it. But I do believe! And you can too.

Can you imagine what could happen if you believed?

Springs of Living Water

Texts: Exodus 17.1-7; Psalm 95; John 4.5-42

In October 2000, much of the state of Victoria found itself without hot water. A key gas processing plant exploded, rendering most of the state's hot water systems useless. For weeks, the Melbourne papers showed pictures of scantily-clad people cuing at public utilities and hostels, hanging out for that hot shower. I was in Melbourne for a Minister's retreat during the crisis. We were staying at a centre which happened to have electric showers. It was very comical to see the Victorians heading for the showers the moment they arrived, and to hear their shouts of glee filtering down to the lounge from the upstairs bathrooms. The whole episode caused me to reflect on how much we Australians take for granted. I remember staying with my wife, Lil's, Aunty Mary once. Mary works as a doctor in Fiji. We got to talking about the contrast between life in Australia and life in Fiji. Mary pointed out that the most valuable facility an Australian house possesses is not the television, or the microwave oven, or the electric lights and heaters, but the capacity to provide pure, clean, running water by a simple turn of the tap.

The readings from Scripture today remind us that water is most certainly not to be taken for granted. In the ancient Near East, where these stories were first told, water was a very scarce commodity indeed. Much of the land in and around Palestine was extremely dry and arid. Indeed, after several millennia of de-forestation, it is even more so today. Although the Israeli irrigation schemes have become legendary for their efficiency in providing water for Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and some of the other big towns, it remains the case that much of the countryside is still serviced by little more than the wells dug in biblical times. It is still customary for some folk, rural folk in particular, to walk great distances to draw water in the manner of their ancestors. In dry and dusty climes like these, water is valued more than gold. It is properly regarded as both the bringer, and the sustainer, of life itself.

No wonder, then, that the Bible frequently uses the image of water to describe the gift of God for the renewal of a parched and dry life. In Exodus we read the story of the people's thirst. Having left Egypt in miraculous circumstances some months before, the people now find themselves in an inhospitable wilderness called Sin, and their thirst has become intolerable. They cry out against Moses and his God, saying, 'Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our livestock and our children with thirst?' An exasperated Moses goes to God and asks for a solution. The Lord instructs Moses to strike the rock of Horeb, from whence water will flow to quench the people’s thirst. He does so, and the people drink. Now, as with most Bible stories, whatever the historical circumstances that gave this story birth, it is being retold here for a purpose, a theological purpose. So let us listen for that purpose, else we shall miss the point.

Let me suggest to you that the thirst of the Israelites here represents their poverty of spirit before God. Note that the people have been wandering in the desert of Sin (a most revealing name, don't you think?), a place of meaningless desolation where there is precious little to live for. It is a place that represents their fundamental lack of trust in Yahweh, with whom they began to quarrel from the very moment the Red Sea closed behind them. Faced with an uncertain future, the people seem to quickly forget all that miraculous, cosmic, stuff around the liberation from Egypt. So much so, that they even begin to long for the slavery they left behind! 'Take us back', they say. 'Take us back to the place of slavery. It was so good there, compared to this terrible thirst we feel!'

Here the Israelites do what many of us do. They re-write the history of the old days in order to give comfort in a time of uncertainty or fear. The ‘old’ days, in these circumstances, have an uncanny knack for being far rosier than the history books would suggest, and certainly far better than these ‘new’ days could ever be! In moments of uncertainly or fear, people are very prone to nostalgia for a place and a feeling that never really existed. They are also prone to blame the loss of that nostalgic Eden on anyone else but themselves! In this case, it was Yahweh and his servant Moses who copped the blame. Frequently, in these days of apparently diminished Christianity, it is pastors and church leaders who are to blame. In his reflection on this story, the writer of Psalm 95 says that, in fact, the people have no-one to blame but themselves, for they were stubborn and hard of heart. They would not, in the face of uncertainty and fear, trust themselves to the God who had gotten them this far. Preferring the devil they already knew, their hunger and thirst turned to the gods of Egypt once more, the gods who had done nothing but turn them into slaves.

And yet, for all this, the Exodus story finishes not with God's condemnation, but with God's rather surprising provision of water. God sustains the people's lives, though they clearly don't deserve it, and keeps them moving towards the land of promise. Who would have thought? There is an extraordinary word of grace here for us. How many of us are like the Israelites who, having made a radical choice for faith long ago, now long for all that we foreswore at that time? How many of us, having chosen to follow in the footprints of the Crucified, now daydream about life in the service of other gods? Well, I do, for one. Sometimes I lie awake at night and wonder if I'm stark-raving mad; I lie there fantasizing about all those other lives I might have lived. Like the one where I’m an ethics-free corporate lawyer, retreating periodically to my wine-soaked retreat-house in Tuscany. Or the one where I’m Paris Hilton, the limit of my responsibility-free zone being exceeded only by the size of my credit-limit. But no, I became a follower of Christ, which immediately excluded either of these possibilities. And, let’s face it, in the eyes of our possession-obsessed society, that means I am one to be either pitied or detested. Can you see how these mid-night wonderings are a hungering and a thirsting? Like some of you, I hazard to guess, I wake up in the middle of the night feeling that my life has become dry and barren. I long for something more.

Of course, as the much-maligned (but scarily insightful) St. Augustine of Hippo said, all of us remain restless until we find our home in God. When Jesus met the woman at the well, he promised that the water he would give would be able to quench her thirst entirely. We thirst without end until we are given the water of God's Spirit to drink. We hunger until we are satiated by Christ, who is the bread of life. Only God can fill the hole inside. Only God can make life meaningful, right? Yes, but how constantly do we believe this? How vulnerable to the views of others do we remain?

Each of us, said Margaret Cooley, are mirror-selves, people who see ourselves not as we are, but as others see us. So that if others think Christians are naïve fools, we eventually become vulnerable to thinking that way ourselves. And the more we do, the more thirsty we become. Instead of hungering and thirsting after God, we start to hunger and thirst after other 'gods'. Gods like approval from others. Gods like 'the old days'. Gods like the perceived right to a sanitized, pain-free, life. Gods that can never, in a million years, satiate our desire for meaningfulness. Gods that succeed only in making us more thirsty, not less, because they are ultimately ureal, so many chimera: creations of desire and therefore never unable to finally satisfy desire. In this way, all of us who thirst are not so very different to those Israelites in the wilderness, or like the Samaritans who made the marriage covenant with all those pagan gods. Having chosen to believe in God's promise of a land flowing with milk and honey, we started on the journey to find it. Yet, along the way our minds and hearts begin to yearn for lesser things. Deep down we begin to have our doubts. We turn from God, and ceased to believe in the promise. We, like both the Israelites of old and the Samaritans of the first century, become prone to the worship of lesser gods, ever wanting to cleave unto husbands whose promises prove, in the end, to be empty.

Like the woman of Samaria, we may indeed lose our way in life. When faced with earthquakes and tsunamis, with nuclear meltdowns and collapsing buildings -whether literal or figurative - whether as individuals or as church communities, we are tempted to covenant ourselves to the control of the many false gods around us. We may indeed become thirsty for the sweeter water they seem to offer. And, very often, we do indeed place ourselves in their devilish hands. Sometimes it is so, and there is little point in pretending otherwise. The good news is that God does not abandon us to our empty flirtations. If we listen carefully, as the woman of Samaria listened to Christ, we shall hear a word of grace, the promise of a spring of living water which, being alive and real (rather than chimera, a nothing) is able to re-animate our lives and fill us with all that we really need: the far deeper truth that we are God’s beloved children, that in worshipping God we will find not only God, but also our best selves, the selves and communities we can be when we are alive with the Spirit who is love. That truth, and the knowing of that truth deep in our bones, is indeed as powerful as water to the dying. It can fill us with life, and hope, and the courage that is called faith. It can be, in short, our salvation.

But let me conclude with a few words about what this salvation might look like, 'in the flesh', as it were. As always, there is more to be said than can be said, but let me make just this one point for now. Salvation is certainly not about the giving away or cessation of desire altogether, as in Buddhism. It is not about denying ourselves to the point where we are able to shut down our senses, thereby blocking out the enticements of this world entirely. (Not that the Buddhism of the West even pretends to such a thing! In Western Buddhism, the denial of desire in meditation has a very different purpose: only to give it a much-needed rest, so that the drive for power and success can again go into overdrive when the meditation is over!) By way of contrast, listen to what Jesus tells his disciples in one of the many passages in John's gospel having to do with food and drink, with what is real and what is not: 'My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work'.

Christians do not shut down their senses or their desire; they simply have a desire-transplant. We learn, through a long process of attending to the word of Christ in Scripture and liturgy and Christian community, to desire in a different way, to desire as Christ desires so that our own needs, like his, are entirely met by doing the will of our Father. And what is the will of the Father, according to John? That we should not love our lives so much that we are unable to give them away for the sake of loving another. For, in the words of the Franciscan song, it is indeed ‘in giving we receive and in pardoning that we are pardoned’. And finally, it is quite literally true that it is only in dying to our fear, our uncertainty, and our nostalgia for an Arcadian past and handing it all over to Christ on his cross, that we shall find ourselves raised into the land and into the blessed way of life to which God has called us. This is the Lenten paradox. And, my friends, it is the only way to be saved.

The Fast that Satiates our Hunger

Texts: Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7; Psalm 32; Romans 5.12-19; Matthew 4.1-11

This morning I want to talk about a spiritual practice that, like most spiritual practices in modernity, is rarely practised anymore.  Fasting: going without food. Allowing oneself to experience genuine hunger.

Fasting used to be a very important part of Christian discipleship, especially during the season of the church year that began on Wednesday, the season of Lent.  ‘Lent’, which means ‘spring’ (somewhat anachronistically for us in the southern hemisphere) has served, since its inception in the second century, a dual purpose: (1) to prepare the newly converted for their baptism into the life, death and resurrection of Christ; and (2) to renew the baptised, all the people of God, in the life and discipline of that same Easter faith.  The practice of fasting was seen as an essential part of this purpose because it taught people the discipline of letting the old desires go—the desires that belonged to the old, pre-Christian, way of life—in order to embrace a radically new set of desires, the desires planted in our hearts by the Spirit of Jesus Christ.  Here a clear connection was being drawn between desire and hunger.  The church reasoned that if one could learn to discipline the body’s basic desire for food and drink then one might also learn to discipline the wayward desires of the heart, that these might come to more accurately reflect the love of God in Jesus Christ.

With that history in mind, it is perhaps easy to see why fasting is no longer seen as a particularly relevant or beneficial thing to do, even by many a good Christian.  Modern wisdom has become suspicious, after all, about any practice that would seem to limit or deny what the body (or the soul) feels it ‘needs’. According to the prevailing common-sense, self-denial is a bad thing, an ancient evil, a form of repression which turns perfectly happy, actualized, assertive and confident people into miserable door-mats for others to wipe their feet upon.  What is wrong, after all, with getting what you want?  Greed may not be good, but don’t we all have a right to be happy, and to follow whatever path we choose in order to obtain that happiness?  What is so wrong with eating, or drinking, or sex, if it feeds one’s inner hungers?  What is so wrong with gaining the world through financial or social 'success' if it enlarges one’s happiness?  If I were to name an anthem that sums up all this modern mythologizing, it may well be the Queen song, ‘I want it all’, which seeks to re-define the traditional notion of love so that it is no longer about putting limits on one’s own wants or needs for the sake of the other person, but about enlisting the other person -  indeed all things -  to the cause of one’s own insatiable desire.

Of course, as well as accepting and absorbing the popular mythology, many contemporary Christians have found additional reasons not to fast. Baptists, for example, often reject the practise as too 'Catholic', too much to do with working one’s way to salvation and not enough to do with being saved by God’s grace alone.  The irony here is that many of the first Baptists were very diligent fasters.  Not because they accepted the supposedly Roman Catholic notion of working one’s way to God through good works and self-discipline, but because, for them, fasting was a way to make room in one’s life for a different kind of feasting, a feasting upon the word of God.  One cannot attend to God or God’s word, which is the only source of life, they argued, unless one also, and at the same time, seeks to put aside the many false gods which clamour for our attention.  Like the god of one’s stomach, for example.  In this, ironically, the early Baptists were closer to both Catholic and biblical teaching than they are to a great many of the moderns who bear their name.

For what does the Bible actually teach us about hunger, desire, and fasting?  Well, there’s the story from Genesis, for a start, the story about Adam and Eve eating fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and of evil.  Note, here, that in contrast to many contemporary assumptions about the story, the problem is not that Adam and Eve gave in to desire as such (for God had told them that they could eat and drink pretty much anything else they desired from the garden in which they lived), but that they desired more than was actually good for them.  It might just be possible, you see—despite what the prevailing wisdom says—that desire and need are often rather different.  It might be possible, in fact, that some of the things we desire are really rather poisonous.  Unfortunately, a great many poisons do not advertise their nature as a matter of course.  They can look and taste rather heavenly! That in no way mitigates a poison's essential function and identity, however: ultimately to do little else but injure, deceive or destroy whomever would take it to one's lips or heart.   

That is why I often think of the serpent (who first introduced the ludicrous idea that poison might actually be good for you) as the very first advertising executive!  Just as the serpent argued that the fruit of the tree would not kill Adam and Eve, but make them like God, so modern advertising tries to convince us that bigger and shinier houses, cars, toys, drinks, gadgets and television programmes will make us the masters of our own destinies and fulfil our every hunger.  In truth, of course, they cannot and they do not.  More usually, these many shiny things make us miserable because we don’t actually need them: they do not fill the hole that is a non-possessive relationship with God, neighbour and creation.  For that is really all we need, according to Scripture: relationships of love in which there is nothing to possess, because everything we need has already been given us.  The truth is that all this other stuff, this consuming of things, does little else than distract us from what is really real: God, and who were are in God’s embrace.

Paul deepens the point in his reflection on this story in the letter to the Romans.  While sin and death came into the world via Adam’s desire for something he had never desired before - through his trust in the serpent’s lie - life and relationship come into the world through the simple and foundational reality of the gift, or grace.  I mean, think about it for just one second.  God has already given us all that we need in creation, and in the revelation that God, from eternity, desires nothing other than to know and love us.  The gift of Jesus Christ, says Paul, is first of all the good news that this is still the case, in spite of the fact that we have woven for ourselves so many other desires, desires for things that succeed only to maim or destroy human life.  Yet, in Christ, there is the further gift of forgiveness.  In Christ God teaches us that even where we have harmed and maimed and killed for the sake of our desire, even where we have forsaken the gifts or God for the sake of so many chimera without any substance or gravity whatsoever, God is willing to forgive.  To go searching for us in the wilderness of our sin, to take us again to Godself and give us the gift of life and of healing.  If only we will let go of our poisonous addictions!

The temptations of Jesus, as they are enumerated in Matthew’s account, make this point yet again, but in another way.  According to this story, the practise of fasting is indeed about the denial of self, but the self that is being denied is the self that buys into the lies of the devil.  For the self that desires to (1) turn the whole world, as if by magic, into something that I can consume; or (2) turn God into someone who is only there to confirm and serve my desire; or (3) turn every other being into my slave, engaged only to confirm and serve my desire; is ultimately a false self that has tragically retreated from the fulness of a world already given us in grace and love by God.  It is a self that indeed dreams of becoming like a god, but certainly not the God revealed in Jesus Christ.  For the Father of Jesus is a God who invites and pleads and remonstrates with his creation, but never bullies or coerces or forces us accept his path.  The god we would become, on the other hand - by all our misplaced faith in demonic lies - is a god who sucks our loved ones, the true God and, indeed, the whole world, into despotic slavery.

Therefore, when Jesus resists such lies, when he resists the temptations of the devil, he is not harming his essential self, the self that is God’s and belongs to God’s way of love.  It is the other self he is harming: the accumulating, consuming, magical self, the inner demon who would make all the world its food and its slave.  It is the self that Thomas Merton rightly called ‘the false self’, ‘false’ because it is built upon a lie.

As followers of Jesus, we too are called to resist such a self, and to do so because what we desire most of all is not a house built of lies on a foundation of sand, but the firm and real house that is God’s welcoming love.  This home is a gift of God, given in creation itself, and given again in Jesus Christ, who comes to us anew each day in the stories of Scripture, the sacrament of bread and wine, the call of the neighbour and the witness of the faithful.  In this perspective, to fast from all that is a lie in order to listen to what is true, to fast from all that would poison in order to drink from the waters of life, is not really a fast at all.  It is to quieten one's heart and its false desires, in order to listen for the one word, the one gift, that is able to save us from ourselves. It is to make room in one's longing for the immeasurable gift of God’s friendship, that is alone finally able to satisfy our deepest hunger and quench our deepest thirst.

Glory be to God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as in the beginning, so now, and for ever.  Amen.

What's all this LENT stuff about, anyway?

Most of the Christian churches worship God within an ecumenically agreed pattern of biblical readings and sacred seasons known as the liturgical year. With its origins in Jewish festivals like Passover and Pentecost – which commemorate the most important events in Jewish salvation history – the Christian year is the Church’s annual pilgrimage into the significance of Christ’s saving life, death, resurrection and ascension for our time and every time. It is nothing less, therefore, than a theological interpretation of reality as a whole.

Lent (a word which simply means ‘spring’ in old Germanic, and is therefore somewhat anachronistic in this part of the world) is a season of preparation for Easter. Lasting for 40 days (excluding Sundays, which are always a ‘little Easter’), it is the time when enquirers into the faith are enrolled as candidates for baptism and enter their final preparations. Candidates are called to imitate Christ’s time in the wilderness as he prepared for ministry and faced the many demonic temptations of his age. At another level, they are called to join Jesus in an imaginative pilgrimage from Galilee to Jerusalem, where everything is lost, but far more is found.

Lent is also the time when the whole church is called to return to the watersof baptism and discern therein, again and again, the precise form its radical obedience to God ought to take for the year at hand. For baptism, to which the whole season points and for which it prepares, is at once the death of Christ and the death of his followers. It is our death to all that would maim and destroy on God’s hallowed earth; it is Christ’s exorcism of all that can kill the body but can never kill the divine life itself.

In the Great Three Days, which straddle the end of Lent and the beginning of Easter, the church recalls Christ’s baptismal passage from ruin to triumph, from death through hell and into the living hope of resurrection life. In the baptisms that are performed and celebrated as Easter dawns, the church embraces that hope and promises anew to live in the power of the resurrection yet one year more.

As preparation for this great Paschal festival of death and rebirth, Lent is littered with rituals that seek to inspire a fundamental conversion of life. The day before Lent begins – traditionally known as ‘mardigras’ or Shrove Tuesday – is a feast with a particular purpose, the feast one has before a fast or a famine. We mock its significance if we reduce it to either a mere fundraiser or a celebration of sin. It is the feast of plenty that one enters into knowing full well that such feasting is not entirely good for one’s spiritual health. It is the party with your family before you go into the wilderness to fast and pray and seek the face of God. It is the last supper before you take the narrow path that leads to salvation.  ‘Fat Tuesday’ looks, with an appropriate level of apprehension, toward the 40 days of lenten fasting, in which the Christian is called to develop a discipline able to resist the demon gluttony and learn to feast, instead, on the word of God that is able to save us from the fires of our own destruction. It is also about the fast called ‘justice’, by which we are called to become poor, like Christ, that others may be enriched.

Thus, the day after Shrove Tuesday, Lent begins in earnest with the fast known as Ash Wednesday. As the name suggests, the central symbol at work here is that of ashes. Ashes are a biblical symbol of fragility, ruin, and repentance in the face of our greatest evils. Humanity, the ritual suggests, is little more than dust and ashes in the last analysis. Though God has given us a good world, by our choice for greed and gluttony, we destroy each other and burn into nothingness everything that is good or noble or praiseworthy.

The imposition of ashes on one’s forehead, sometimes mixed with baptismal water or chrism oil, reminds us of this uncomfortable but ultimately undeniable fact. The ritual also speaks of the mercy of God by which the truly penitent may be brought to life once more. Ashes we may be, but the grace of Jesus Christ has the power to reanimate even a worthless pile of dust and ashes so that it can become the compost of a better world.

In this, Ash Wednesday is a beginning symbol and anticipation of the Easter event to which Lent is leading. It speaks of our ruin, but also of the possibility of rebirth and renewal through a power in the world that is even stronger than our will-to-destruction: the love of God in Jesus Christ.

Previously published in Crosslight on March 6, 2011.