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Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Isaiah 58:1-12; Psalm 51:1-17;
2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6; 16-21
Ash Wednesday readings are the same for all three liturgical years – does that tell us anything?
The week leading up to Ash Wednesday culminates in “Fat Tuesday,” when everything containing fat must be either eaten up or discarded in order to prepare for the great 40-day fast called “Lent,” when not only is there food fasting. there is also fasting from entertainment, fun, and sex. It is time to “repent” of all the petty sins we may have done by omission or commission. But “repent” has come to mean “feel sorry about” rather than “turning around and away.” Maybe that’s why we have to continually repeat the process. Feeling sorry about something is no great motivation for changing – at least on a permanent basis. I’m sure that some of the folks who ate and drank to excess during the carnival season are “repenting” of that behavior today, but come next carnival the party will undoubtedly be joined once more.
Ash Wednesday is all about imperial piety, which means marking believers’ foreheads with a cross drawn with ashes, often made from burning left-over palms from the previous year’s Palm Sunday. This makes a nice tidy connection: the Palms we symbolically waved to celebrate the triumphal entry into Jerusalem of Jesus the conquering hero are now used to mark us like Cain with the evidence of our sin. Doesn’t all this fly in the face of Jesus’s scorn for those who “make their faces unrecognizable so they may be publicly recognized”? (Matt. 6:16, The Five Gospels) Never mind that Jesus never said any such thing, and that Matthew added this to his collection of Jesus’s sayings on his own. The point stands. Public piety does nothing but score points with the empire.
We might keep that in mind during this election year.
Ash Wednesday has its purpose, IF the paradigm is truly shifted, which a 40-day fast from the normalcy of civilization might possibly accomplish. Meanwhile, guilt is another word for cheap grace. Go ahead and eat your bread and soup meal this evening in honor of the illegal aliens who are denied basic humanitarian needs like food, shelter, and clothing – not to mention Iraqi children, refugees in Darfur, the list goes on and on. You can always go home and top it off with a bedtime snack (hmm... sounds like those awful Corinthians Paul was so mad at).
“God” is not going to listen anyway – as Isaiah makes clear. “Day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God.” They have the nerve to ask God why God pays no attention to their fasts. “Like DUH!” Isaiah says, “You serve your own interests on your fast day, and oppress all your workers! HELLO!”