In
a world darkened by sin, prayers of confession and pleas for forgiveness are
the acceptable sacrifices to God.
In most religions it is common to have a
rhythm between fasting and feasting. In
Christianity, Lent is the season of fasting before the feasting of the Easter
season.
In the early centuries, the fasting of Lent
lasted only two or three days before Easter, but after the fourth century the
fasting was gradually extended in the Western Church to the traditional 40 days
before Easter, not counting the six Sundays of Lent. (All Sundays are feasts, so one does not fast
on Sundays.)
Ash Wednesday is the beginning of the Lenten fasting for
Christians. It is the solemn moment that
opens a period of recognizing the sinful condition in which humans find
themselves. It begins a time of
contrition for acts and omissions that separate one from God; a time of
mourning for what has been lost – from the world and from one’s self. And communally, it confesses a painful
falling short of God’s expectation for justice and compassion from human to
human.
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17.
The prophetic reading presents a great crisis for the community –
the very Day of the Lord, “a day of darkness and gloom” (verse 2, NRSV ).
The crisis is total; it includes everyone in
the community.
Sanctify the congregation;
assemble
the aged;
gather the children,
even
infants at the breast… (verse 16).
Though scholars have long recognized that the
prophet refers to a terribly severe locust plague, the oracles seem
deliberately vague and ominous. The
horror impending is not entirely natural.
It has overtones of eschatological warfare.
Like blackness spread upon the mountains
a
great and powerful army comes;
their like has never been from of old,
nor
will be again after them
in
ages to come (verse 2).
The psychological and spiritual tone is of
ultimate doom. All personal and communal
reality is under this shadow. Nothing
else matters.
The appropriate human response is
repentance.
Yet even now, says the Lord,
return
to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with
mourning;
rend
your hearts and not your clothing (verses 12-13).
Fasting here is an act showing sorrow, sorrow
for alienation from God. Only a return to God can lead to relief, a
return by all the social body caught in the doom of separation from the source
of holiness.
Fasting, not eating for a day, is an external
sign of emptiness, of the absence of God from the depths of the soul, communal
and personal.
Psalm 51:1-17.
This psalm selection is the quintessential
text for Ash Wednesday. It is the
most profound personal confession of sin in the psalms.
The “lament”
psalms are all arguments for the
defense. The speakers are in trouble of
some kind and they are pleading before the high judge to deliver them from this
trouble. The arguments and rhetorical
strategies developed in a particular lament psalm depend on the source of the
trouble. Whose fault is it? There are three possibilities.
(1) Most commonly, the trouble is caused by
enemies, that is, by others.
These are the prayers of the falsely accused righteous ones, and the
prayer asks God to deliver one from the enemies. Psalm 7 is a striking example.
(2) Less commonly, the trouble is caused by oneself. The speaker is the cause of his
or her own trouble, which in some way or another is sin. It is especially sin against God, but may
include sin against others. These are
the “penitential” psalms, confessing sin and begging for forgiveness, rather
than the destruction of one’s enemies, though accusations against enemies are
sometimes thrown in for good measure.
The seven traditional penitential psalms are 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130,
and 143, but the greatest of these is psalm 51.
(3) Very occasionally the cause of the
speaker’s trouble may be God, which poses a very tricky problem for the
speaker of a lament. (It is necessary to
indict the judge!) The speaker’s misery
leads to desperate and daring accusations.
I am silent; I do not open my mouth,
for
it is you who have done it.
Remove your stroke from me;
I
am worn down by the blows of your hand (Psalm 39:9-10, NRSV ).
This complex type of accusation is at least
hinted at in psalms 39 and 88, and has its full blown expression, of course, in
the book of Job.
The power and profundity of Psalm 51 stand on
their own. Read it, carefully and thoughtfully,
preferably in more than one translation.
Only a few features of the reading will be noticed here.
The language of
sin and forgiveness. The psalm speaks of “transgressions,”
“iniquity,” and “sin” (singular) and uses verbs “to sin” and “to do evil.” For purposes of this psalm, these are all
synonyms. “Against you, you alone, have
I sinned…” (verse 4). The personal
relation to God has been alienated by the sin, transgressions, and
iniquity.
The speaker affirms that sin is a kind of
power that threatens one’s whole existence.
It extends back to conception and birth.
“I was born guilty, / a sinner when my mother conceived me” (verse 5,
NRSV. The Tanak [Jewish Publication Society] version
translates, “I was born with iniquity; with sin my mother conceived me.”). This does not refer to sexuality as
somehow sinful, of course, but to the
inevitability of sinning as humans live in the real world.
A variety of images are used for God’s forgiving
sin. “Blot out transgressions” views
sin as illegally crossing a boundary (trans-gress). Such action leaves tracks in the sand, and
forgiveness means that these tracks are erased – removing evidence that one
stepped over the line.
“Wash me from my iniquity” is scrubbing off
dirt and filth from one’s body.
“Cleanse me from my sin” is a ritual expression, meaning to purify
someone or something that has become “unclean” and thus is denied access to
sacred precincts, to the divine presence.
An extension of this last image is, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall
be clean” (verse 7). Hyssop was the
branch of a shrub that was used as a brush to sprinkle holy water or blood in
ritual settings (Leviticus 14:4 and Exodus 12:22 ).
Expressing a more personal action by God are
“wash me and I shall be whiter than snow,” “hide your face from my sins,” and,
“let the bones that you have crushed rejoice,” that is, let there be a wholly
new recovery of my health and wholeness before you!
The climax of praying for forgiveness,
however, is the plea for full personal transformation.
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and
put a new and right spirit within me….
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and
sustain in me a willing spirit (verses 10 and 12).
A final argument for why God should forgive
and renew this person is the witness it will create among others. “O Lord, open my lips, / and my mouth will
declare your praise.” Then, the speaker
declares, a true offering will be made to God.
The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken
spirit;
a
broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise (verses 15 and 17).
That final declaration is the essential
message of Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent.
II Corinthians 5:20b-6:10.
The epistle reading begins, “We entreat you
on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (NRSV). Reconciliation to God is the
long-range goal of self-examination, of sorrow for sins, of confession of
emptiness apart from God, and of trust in the promise of forgiveness.
There follows a remarkable statement of the
divine action in Christ. The statement
is a little clumsy but is the more striking for that reason. Very literally it reads, “The one knowing no
sin [Christ], … he [God] made sin, in order that we might become the
righteousness of God in him” (verse 21).
The expression “Christ was made sin” probably
plays on the double meaning of the Hebrew word for sin (ḥattā’t). This same Hebrew
word means both a sinful condition and a sin-offering that removes that
condition. Sinners bring a sin-offering
to the altar which the priest sacrifices for them and they are freed of their
sinful condition. That is how the ritual
cult worked. Paul is saying that Christ
went to the altar (read “cross”) as a sin-offering on our behalf. Therefore, as long as we are “in him”
(included in the effect of his sacrifice) we live in the benefit of that
sin-offering and are reconciled to God.
In the remainder of the passage Paul
elaborates the roles of the apostles as “ambassadors” of Christ (5:20a),
ambassadors who bring to sinners the message that reconciliation is
available. He emphasizes the great hardships
and acts of self-denial that the ambassadors of Christ go through in this work
for God (6:4-10).
The Gospel reading for Ash Wednesday is
subordinate to the prayer of confession in the psalm. This selection from the Sermon on the Mount
warns against conspicuous consumption in religion – against
public displays when one practices charity (verses 2-4), prays in public
(verses 5-6), and when one fasts (verses 16-18). Such religiousness for public consumption is
its own reward. It leaves the relation
of God and sinner unaltered.
What must be sought instead is something that
makes a difference in heaven, not just in the media or opinion polls, not just
accumulating earthly treasures (verses 19-21).
In a word, true religion – “the sacrifice acceptable to God” (Psalm
51:17) – is not about externals, but about the inner being, about “a clean
heart” and “a new and right spirit within.”
One may take ashes
on one’s forehead at the Ash Wednesday service, but what counts is the
awareness of the darkness in the world and in oneself – the darkness exposed by
the proclamation of the Day of the Lord, and illuminated only by the promise of
God’s forgiveness.
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