I have kept the liturgical year all my life. I am familiar with its festivals and seasons, its colours and moods. But what I have found is that as this familiarity roles on, there are occasionally moments when suddenly a liturgy becomes rich with meaning and insight as if it were the first time you had ever celebrated it. And that happened to me for Ash Wednesday two years ago.
As a child Ash Wednesday was faintly amusing, the night when we got dirty foreheads before going home a little lacklustre to ponder fives weeks without chocolate or whatever it was that we had been encouraged to give up for Lent. Then as I got older I found myself being embarrassed by it and then even becoming suspicious of it. I read Feuerbach at university and became convinced that what Ash Wednesday was really about was Christianity yet again denigrating human beings with all this gloomy talk about sin and death and telling us that human society would only flourish if we denied ourselves and hankered after a supernatural realm that was largely inaccessible to us. I was having none of it!
But two years ago I was standing with a group of pilgrims to the Holy Land in the Masada Desert. We were standing on a hill looking out over a seemingly never-ending expanse of barren desert landscape, hearing little more than the wind blowing around us. Our liturgy began, and a priest licked his thumb, he bent down and pressed it into the fine sand of the desert and made the sign of the cross on my forehead. “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.” And I stared at the vast expanse of the desert. And I felt the wind on my face. And all that stuff about Ash Wednesday being negative and morose just fell away, because for some reason, I felt extraordinarily free.
I felt a bit like Adam, the first man, as if God had just fashioned my body out of that very dust on which I was standing. And like Adam I felt naked before God, like I had nothing to hide behind, no fantasies or pretensions that could take away my vulnerability. And rather than being depressed or frightened by that, I simply felt free. Because in acknowledging who I really am, I also knew more fully that God was God, vaster than the desert, more alive than the wind and beyond all my dreams and imaginings.
Like all these moments it passed quickly, but it left its legacy. For a short time I had been able to give up on certain fantasies about myself and my independence from God. And I had a profound sense that I was a creature who, like Adam, would one day die. And that was ok, because God was God. And when I went back to my hotel room in Jerusalem I wrote in my journal that when I do have to face death (hopefully many years from now), I would need to recover that feeling that I had experienced that afternoon, and maybe I would need to return to Masada.
It’s actually a very difficult feeling to recapture because so much of the culture around us is pushing in exactly the opposite direction. The last thing that anyone in today’s Western world wants to be reminded of is their mortality. Certainly nobody believes that being reminded of it – even embracing it – could in any sense be liberating.
We live in a very busy culture and when people are frantically busy its often because they are in denial about something. Do you ever wonder if our frantically busy modern culture is actually trying not to think about really meaningful things? Busily justifying itself through economic growth and consumption because its in denial about some core realities? Perhaps in denial about the reality of death from which human beings can never redeem themselves?
Medical science is pushing the boundaries of mortality as far as it can, while paying little attention to the quality of life that we might enjoy in those older years. I read an article recently which suggested that my one-year-old nephew is likely to live to well over a hundred and if he enjoys all those years I will surely be happy for him. But I wonder, is the secular Western world chasing after the dream that we can drive death away altogether? Have we come to believe that death is the greatest failure and that liberation comes in eradicating death rather than embracing it?
For us who are Christians, accepting and embracing our mortality is a fundamental step on the journey of faith. Indeed it’s the primary step because it is the moment when we acknowledge that we are not God. Thus it is the moment when we allow God the possibility of redeeming us because we stop trying to redeem ourselves. We allow God the possibility of glorifying us because we stop claiming the glory for ourselves.
That was what the scribes and Pharisees in our gospel story tonight found very difficult. In claiming the right to judge and to condemn – the right even to take away another person’s life in the process – they were running away from their own mortality. They weren’t allowing God to be God. They denied that they were mortal, fallible humans in need of redemption and rather than embracing their mortality they projected their guilt onto this woman and made her their scapegoat. And as so often in the Gospels, in this story it is in the vulnerability of the unacceptable outsider that the glory of God is revealed. In this woman’s shame and humiliation and fear for her very life, the abundant grace of the divine mercy is made manifest. Just imagine her fear and sense of inferiority in the face of these arrogant, bloodthirsty men. Not for a moment does this woman delude herself that she can be God, that she could live forever. And it’s in that state that redemption occurs.
Whether it’s in the Masada desert or in our church here in Hampstead, on Ash Wednesday we step into that vulnerable place of embracing our mortality so that we can allow God to be God and so that we can allow this season of Lent to become a time when God can work redemption within us. Let’s allow this imposition of ashes to be a sign of that sentiment, a reminder of who we are so that we can allow God to be God. It’s not morose or denigrating, it’s the beginning of freedom.
We don’t know what it was the Jesus wrote in the dust as the scribes and Pharisees attacked the woman. But maybe he wrote “Remember that you came from this and you will return to it” and maybe he wrote it for their redemption as much as for hers.