Essay for Ash Wednesday
Week of Monday, March 3, 2003
Lectionary Readings
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
Isaiah 58:1-12
Psalm 51:1-17
2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
This Wednesday Christians around the world will mark the beginning of Lent by observing Ash Wednesday. In these forty days leading up to Easter, believers devote special attention to the disciplines of repentance, self-examination, and self-denial. The ashes which many traditions daub on the forehead are an outward symbol of our inner penitence, and also a deliberately grim reminder of our mortality as heard in the words that God spoke to Adam in Genesis 3:19, words which are often read during Lent: “for dust you are, and to dust you will return” (NIV).
Repentance is essential to the Christian life. According to Mark, the very first words of Jesus's public ministry were, “The time has come, the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the Good News!” (Mark 1:15). Thus, most all the lectionary texts for this week (see above) speak about confession and repentance, including what might be the most powerful and elegant confession in all of Christian history, David's Psalm 51. If you do nothing else for Lent, read Psalm 51 and you will have done well indeed. But confessing and repenting well might be easier said than done.
Confession and repentance are privileges to enjoy, not penalties to fear. They signal good news about God's forgiveness, not bad news about our failures. Brennan Manning describes how many Catholics growing up a generation ago struggled with chronic guilt and shame due to a morbid preoccupation with their sin. He imagines a conscientious Catholic at Yankee Stadium one Friday night in June 1950:
You want a hot dog. Now, just considering eating meat on Friday is a venial sin; wanting to is another one. You have not moved in your seat and you have already sinned twice. What if you actually ate one? Aside from the risk of choking on forbidden food and getting punished right on the spot, have you committed a mortal or venial sin? Well, if you think it's mortal, it may be mortal; and if you think it's venial, it still may be mortal. After much thought, you decide it's venial. You call the hot dog vendor, you take the money out of your pocket, and you buy a hot dog. This is clearly an act of free will. You figure you can go confess your sin to the priest on Saturday night. But wait! Does a venial sin become mortal when you commit it deliberately? That's a chance you take. What if you've forgotten it's Friday? In that case, eating the hot dog may not be a sin, but forgetting it's Friday is. What if you remember it's Friday halfway through the hot dog? Is it a venial sin to finish it? If you throw it away, is wasting food a sin? Within five minutes you have committed enough sins to land you in purgatory for a million years. The simplest thing to do is not to take any chances—stay away from Yankee Stadium on Fridays.1Such scenarios are funny, but it is also true that for many people “the sense of guilt and shame were terribly real.” We need to remind ourselves that confession and repentance are not a penalty to appease an angry God, not some narcissistic introspection, nor a guessing game with a capricious deity. Rather, they are privileges by which we unburden ourselves of real (as opposed to imagined) sins and restore a right relationship with a God of unfailing love and great compassion (Psalm 51:1). Our Lenten demeanor, then, is penitential, sure enough; but it is full of joy and hope, not doom and gloom.
Manning's scenario above provokes another point. According to one of the texts for this week, God desires “truth in the innermost being” (Psalm 51:6). But I find that this is precisely what is sometimes so hard to know. Is eating Manning's proverbial hot dog really wrong, a little wrong, or not wrong at all? And how do you know for sure? Perhaps this is why the Psalmist prays, “Who can discern his errors? Forgive my hidden faults” (Psalm 19:11–13). In Romans 7:14–25 Paul is exasperated with his own self; he wonders why he does things that he knows are wrong, and why he fails to do things that he knows are right. Rather than perform the good he desires, he commits the evil he detests. He confesses, “I do not understand what I do” (Romans 7:15). Yet even with his contradictory impulses that “wage war” within him, even committing sins of omission and commission, Paul can still say, “in my inner being I delight in God's law.” For Paul, delighting in God's kingdom and struggling mightily with inner demons are not mutually contradictory.Thus we pray with David, “create in me a pure heart, O God” (Psalm 51:10), even as we confess that this is exactly what we do not have.
During Lent many Christians will give up something they enjoy as an act of self-denial and penitence. What can we say about such practices? In Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism there arose the sacrament of penance (from the Latin poena, meaning “penalty,” but not to be confused with penitence or sorrow). The idea was that inward contrition is necessary, but by itself not sufficient; it needs to be accompanied by an outward act of self-denial or self-abasement. In itself, there is nothing wrong and perhaps many things good about outward acts to symbolize interior choices. Unfortunately, in time the outward act came to predominate. Eventually, in the west, penance led to the growth of indulgences—a monetary payment for the remission of sin and its punishments. In the First Crusade in 1095, for example, Pope Urban II promised indulgences to all who fought to “liberate” the Holy Land. By 1215 penance at least once a year had become compulsory.
Jesus does not discourage outward, symbolic acts. But in one of the lectionary texts for this week he reminds us that we should not do our outward acts for show before people, but instead focus on doing them “in secret” where God alone knows our hearts. He gives the examples of giving alms to the needy, praying in public and fasting. Similarly, in another text for this week, Joel urges us to “rend your hearts and not your garments” (Joel 2:13). Isaiah writes that a real fast is not to abstain from food but to help the needy (Isaiah 58:6). And in David's famous penitential Psalm, he is even so bold as to say that God takes “no delight” in religious rituals like sacrifices and burnt offerings; the ultimate sacrifice, David says, “is a broken spirit” or a “contrite heart.” (Psalms 51:15–17).
So, daubing ashes on your forehead this Wednesday is not unimportant or wrong. Neither is giving up something for Lent. But these are pointers to the good news that “if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9); they should not be gloomy reminders for morbid introspection. They might rightly serve as reminders that, like Paul, even though we long for God's kingdom, there are many things we still do not understand about ourselves. And finally, such outward acts can be rich reminders of broken hearts and contrite spirits whom God truly welcomes and warmly embraces.
The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself Copyright ©2003 by Dan Clendenin. All Rights Reserved.
