6th February 2008Ash Wednesday
Fr David Cherry
Joel 2 : 1 – 2 & 12 – 17 ; II Corinthians 5 : 20b - 6 : 10 ; Matthew 6 : 1 – 6 & 16 – 21
Return to the LORD, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and repents of evil.
Here, we come to acknowledge that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.
I was reminded this morning of the Response to the Versicle :
“Have a nice day.” - which is, of course:
“Thank you. But I have other plans.” It works,
doesn’t it?
The self communication of the Creator God through the pages and story
of Bible is one of infinite love. Come back to me. A
wooing, a ‘see what it is like’, a see ‘what I am
like’ : Yahweh, a God for you, willing to appease and go
down to Hades to bring you back to me. This indefatigable love is
made personal in Jesus, the High Priest of this new Religion, coming
forth to renew Creation, to restore to heal, to bind together and make
whole.
A strange God, but only the kind of God one can really worship, love and adore; give oneself over to in trust and want to obey.
To us have come prophets telling us God’s plan is for peace and
not retribution. He comes to appease us and bind up wounds.
“If only you knew what God is offering you” – we will
hear Jesus say to the Samaritan woman on the third Sunday of Lent.
We are quite capable of recognising the answer that sinful humanity has
made as described in the first chapters of Genesis, back in Eden where
desire gave rise to envy, envy to rivalry and wishing the other’s
downfall; a rivalry for God’s attention which gave rise to
fratricide: this false imagination we live by. “Thank
you. But I have other plans.”
We are good at spotting the calamitous consequences of disobedience to
God in the world and the damage to Creation. We easily notice
what ‘they’ do or don’t do :
‘them.’ We are less willing to acknowledge that this
‘they’ is ‘us’; this ‘them’ is
‘me.’
The Christian life is one of solidarity with all Creation and with all
people; solidarity with the beauty of humanity, but also : solidarity
with its sin.
In Confession, there are these wonderful words after the absolution,
from the Priest : ‘whatsoever good you do or evil you
endure…’ We are engaged in good and evil,
called to combat it and all caught up in an infection we suffer as we
are formed from around us. Creation, with us, groans in one great
act of travail until the fullness of freedom is given to us.
So the Christian life is one of rejoicing in a God, gracious and
merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love as the prophet
Joel tells us; AND also it is one of penance, one of returning again
and again and again. This involves a shift in attitude which is a
kind of Copernican revolution of the heart towards God, where I find
that I am in this ‘us’ position, among others, created in
his image, bearing the bright beams of a Creator’s love and yet
denying its claim, its call, its healing. Here, we come to
acknowledge that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.
Ash Wednesday brings us to our knees again. And it is not because
we fear a day of the Lord’s coming, ‘a day of darkness and
gloom’ (as the prophet Joel) – we are already quite
accomplished at making that for ourselves. No, in the light of
two millenia of Easter light, we find ourselves on our knees because
forgiveness has reached us. That we ask forgiveness, that we want
it, is a sign that we are receiving it; that God’s Spirit is at
work and that we have become enlightened by the Gospel.
We return to the Lord that he may free us from all that binds us up,
snarls up our lives: the envy and resentment; the hurt and blame; the
selfish little god of the ego that wants all to adapt to its own
private plan. It is of freedom that St Paul speaks in the epistle
– spiritual freedom. This is what this indefatigable God is
offering us.
How shall we come by such healing and wholeness? No less than in
most of the world’s religions the way is one of
self-denial. Not denying who we truly are, but denying the false
self its rampant power over us. We fast, we pray, we give
alms.
We fast from self-justification and knowing better. We fast from
complaining and wanting God to come to see our lives our way. We
fast from cynicism and blame. We commit ourselves to pray more so that
we might be better open to his communication to us, a communication
that is more than words, but of Life itself, a sharing in his
life. We come to holy Communion to find it very real and
effective. We give alms so that we might know our solidarity with
all people on the Earth; that it might make us more conscious of
it. Such disciplines, decisive action against our lesser
instincts, are done in secret, not paraded about, for they are about
the soul and its conversion back to God, the freeing of what is true
from the bonds of sin; and interior re-orientation.
This is what God has in store for us on the road to Easter: new
life. Come. Let us go with God’s plan for us; and let
us hear his voice:
Return to the LORD, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to
anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and repents of evil.