Ash Wednesday: Death is Coming

Note: After reading today’s post I invite you to listen to my song called Death is Coming. It can be found just above the post.

Today is Ash Wednesday. Today millions of Christians around the world will go to worship to have ashes smeared on their foreheads in the shape of a cross. They will leave their places of worship and enter back into their ordinary lives as husbands, wives, parents, brothers, sisters, friends, and co-workers as marked people. They will not be marked with a sign of beauty. They will be marked with a symbol of death. The smearing of the ashes on their greasy foreheads with be accompanied with these words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Ash Wednesday is a day we get to be honest about our mortality. The reality is that we will all die. No one can escape death. With each passing year, we are one step closer to death. In the modern age death almost seems to be a thing of the past, especially in the developed world. However, the last two years of the pandemic have brought death back into focus for many of us. As war tears Ukraine apart, we can’t pretend that death has been defeated. It is painfully obvious that we all inhabit a broken and decaying world. For as much as we talk about progress and human flourishing in our modern scientific age, we still can’t wipe out death.

The reality is that death already has its cold harsh grip on each of us. Each day we all make conscious and unconscious decisions that unleash death into God’s good creation. With each spiteful word muttered under our breath, with every hateful thought that passes through our mind, with each polarizing Facebook post we craft we are unleashing death into the world. Realize it or not, we are the walking dead. The reality is that most of us are just in denial of death’s grip on us.

Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves and believed that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt:

“Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

The first man, the Pharisee, the religious man was unaware of death’s grip on his life. He thought he had escaped death by being a religious person. But his religion was the very source of death. His religion made him blind to the ways he was slowly aiding death’s destruction of God’s good creation.

The second man, a tax collector, the lowest of the low in Jesus’ day was very aware of death’s grip on his life and how he had partnered with death’s ever-reaching tentacles. This man was aware of his mortality and the role he played in it. Unlike the religious man, the tax collector didn’t trust in his dead religion. He didn’t make excuses for his actions. All he could do was call upon the mercy of God as he confessed that he was a sinner.

We live in a society that has mastered the art of calling out other people’s sins. We live in a world that has made it completely acceptable to call out other people’s life-destroying actions all while justifying any role we may have played in the unleashing of death into God’s good creation. In today’s culture, you are dammed if you don’t and dammed if you do. If you ignore your sin someone is bound to call you out. If you confess your sin, you will most likely be called out for not doing it right, or that perhaps your motivation wasn’t pure.  

Ash Wednesday isn’t about confessing your sin to other people, although that does have its time and place. Ash Wednesday is an opportunity to confess your sin to God, and this is good news. If we are looking to the world, or culture, or talking heads to absolve us of our sin we are setting ourselves up for failure. No human can love you unconditionally. No human can reverse the power of death. No human can look into the darkness of your heart and still accept you just as you are.

Today as your pastor or priest smears ashes on your forehead in the shape of a cross remember you are being marked with the sign of death. But it is not your cross or your death you are being marked with. It is the sign of Jesus’ cross and Jesus’ death. On Ash Wednesday we are reminded that death is coming. But we are also reminded that the one who created us has placed himself between us and death in Christ Jesus. On this Ash Wednesday may we meditate on Paul’s words found in Romans 5:19:

For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

 Grace and peace ‘til we rise in glory.