and “With their hands, they will support you,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.”
Ash Wednesday: What We are Given
It has always fascinated me that Ash Wednesday is so
popular. In some places, the act of imposing ashes on the forehead of the
faithful has become separated from the Mass of which the ashes are a part. Some
churches use the distribution of ashes as a kind of outreach ministry to the public,
complete with “drive through” ash distribution where you can get a cross of
ashes on the forehead without ever having to leave your car. Who has time to attend
Mass these days, especially on Wednesday?
As well-intentioned as these outreach methods are, they miss
a fundamental point; convenience and accessibility have little to do with true
evangelization. Good news that does not require conversion isn’t “good.”
Simon Tugwell, in his book The Way of Imperfection, discusses
why popularity isn’t as fundamental as conversion in our faith. He writes,
“Christianity has to be disappointing, precisely
because it is not a mechanism for accomplishing all our human ambitions and
aspirations, it is a mechanism for subjecting all things to the will of God. .
. .When people turn away from the church, because they find more satisfaction
elsewhere, it is important not to assume that we, as christians [sic], ought to
be providing such satisfaction ourselves; it is much more urgent that we take
yet another look at what is it that we have genuinely been given in the church.”
What have we been given? On Ash Wednesday, we are given the gift of remembering that “you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” But wait, aren’t we essentially body and soul, and isn’t it the body that returns to ashes while the soul ascends to heaven? This is a popular understanding of our soul and body, but we often forget the body after death, which contradicts what we affirm every Sunday in the Nicene Creed: “We believe in the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting”. Our bodies are part of our resurrection. How that will happen is anyone’s guess, but I imagine God, who created us, will not find it particularly difficult to restore our bodies. While our bodies do “return to dust”, it is the dust of our creation. We return to the essential matter from which God created us. Ash Wednesday asks us to remember where we came from and from whom we came. Christ’s death and resurrection from the dead are integral to the imposition of ashes, and his sacrifice to reveal this “resurrection of the body” (Apostle’s Creed) is made real at all Masses. The resurrection is given to us even as the ashes are traced on our forehead as a cross. To focus on the ash without discerning the nature of the cross is to forget the gift given to us by Christ.
So, for those who go to Mass on Ash Wednesday: Come for the ashes, but stay for the
resurrection.
The Re-Presentation of Our Lord
All things are possible for God
I grew up with this Bible story of the Rich Young Man's entreaty for eternal
life. Sadly, the Young Man cannot part with his possessions. Jesus then
uses this as a teaching moment, not to excoriate the rich, per se, but to show
how powerful we cling to that which impedes us from entering the Kingdom.
There is a popular
story that attempts to deflate the hyperbole of a camel struggling to go
through the eye of a needle. Without any historical evidence, some claim that
there was a lesser gate in the wall surrounding Jerusalem that was opened at
night, and to be able to move a camel through it, the camel had to crouch and
kneel; it becomes inconvenient, but far from impossible. The rich feel better.
Both
the Jerome Biblical Commentary (Catholic commentary) and
the Interpreter's Bible (Protestant) dismiss this "urban
legend". What is telling isn't that this myth of the "eye of a
needle" has had so much traction. This parable, however, isn't a story
about the rich, but a story about the nature of faith.
The power of hyperbole is essential for this parable. It is
more comfortable to believe that God rewards Christians who "do their
duty", who obey the ordinances of the institution; however, Jesus is
asking us to live this impossibility of dispossession---to get
rid of anything that stands in the way of living the gospel.
Sometimes this can be rather a spectacular grace, but often,
it is "whispering grace", grace that comes through a "chance
encounter" with a stranger, or a growing sense of being loved by others
who have experienced God's grace. We then enter the Kingdom. We breach
the impossibly narrow gates we've constructed to keep God's riches out.
Later in this gospel passage, Jesus declares to his
disciples: "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of
God". The nature of the Kingdom isn't an earthly institution we can control
or enter through our wits to gain an advantage. The Kingdom is
ubiquitous. It is all around us. The Kingdom is revealed when we
open our eyes to the grace of our poverty in Christ. There is no greater
act of downsizing than committing oneself to following the way of
Christ rather than the commands of the Church.
The wealth we need to jettison is the wealth of the false
faith that is too often the false security of the institutional Church rather
than the will of God. When the institution doesn't reveal the Good News,
we must live the Good News, not by fighting the church, but by modeling to the
church what the Good News looks like. We must live for the sake of Christ
and the gospel, not the institutional grace of following rules and spending
time trying to enter the Kingdom with what we mistakenly believe is essential.
"No Cross, No Crown"
We Catholics seem to love suffering, or so my Protestant friend is fond of saying. I often retort, "No cross, no crown," which brings a raised eyebrow and suggestion to change the topic. But, I must admit that it is as easy for Catholics to mistakenly evolve a spirituality of suffering for suffering's sake as it is for Protestants to evolve a "gospel of prosperity" where financial gain and material wealth are the goals of being a Christian. Both views are distortions of Jesus' mission.
In the first reading is Abraham's almost-sacrifice of Isaac. Of this parable, early Judaism focused on the element of God testing Abraham, but with time, shifted focus to see the sacrifice in light of Isaac's willingness to submit to the will of his father and offer himself as a type of sacrificial lamb, a theme later picked up by the early Church's understanding of Jesus' Christhood. The Pascal Lamb, as you recall, was the sacrifice for the deliverance of the Jews in captivity from Egyptian oppression; where the blood of the lamb was sprinkled across the lintel of the door as a sign for the Angel of Death to pass over and spare the household. What began as an understanding of Isaac's sacrifice simply as an act of blind compliance evolved into a deeper, more mature meaning of giving of oneself for the sake of others.
This notion was picked up in Isaiah's Suffering Servant and is the character Jesus most closely aligned himself and his ministry around. This understanding of Christ's mission as a servant who suffers for humanity is the foundation of Mark's gospel, which sought to counter the tendency of the early Gnostic-Christian communities' focus on Jesus' divinity revealed in the Transfiguration as the pinnacle revelation of God to humanity, not the suffering on the cross and resurrection; for the Gnostics, Jesus' divinity eclipsed his humanity and made the cross a distraction on the way to the crown. That is why in Mark's gospel, Jesus continually cautions his believers not to reveal his Christhood because it is only in light of his suffering and resurrection that his mission is significant; he is the Suffering Servant Messiah, not the Warrior King messiah portrayed in Isaiah.
"But he was wounded for our transgressions,
he was bruised for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that made us whole,
and with his stripes, we are healed."
Christ's suffering was in the service of reconciling us to God, of bringing everyone into communion. Jesus didn't seek out this suffering; he prayed, "Let this cup pass from me," while his disciples slept in the Garden of Gethsemane. But Jesus also added to his prayer, "Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done." To some extent, suffering is always a mystery; however, some suffering is beyond our comprehension. If we suffer and cannot discern its origin, or it is out of our hands, we should pray for the trial to pass and include our willingness to submit to God's will. We must, however, also not shy away from suffering in the pursuit of justice and love. In the face of injustice, ours is not a retreat into Quietism, into a passive acceptance of the suffering of ourselves and our neighbor, but to face the suffering that will come when we face the oppressor and the rejection that will come when we give our hearts away to the love of our enemies. The Crown only has ultimate significance in light of the love from the Cross.