Love Through Death:
An Ash Wednesday Sermon
Anthony G. Cirilla
At first, it may seem strange to have Valentine’s Day on the same day as Ash Wednesday. How can a day dedicated to romance, love, and affection have anything to do with a day dedicated to remembering our mortality? We know that God loves the life that He put into us. After making Adam and Eve in His image, God looked at his Creation and said in Genesis 1:31 that His creation is very good. Look at the intimate way Scripture describes the creation of the first man: Genesis 2:7 “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Life itself comes from God, the author of life, as we see in Acts 17:25, which says that God “giveth to all life, and breath, and all things.” God looks at the life he gives to us, and says that it is very good – all life is given by God with love for what it means to be alive.
The love for life which motivated God to share life with His Creation was spurned by the first father and mother of the human race. As a sign of their recognition that God and God alone is the author of life, Adam and Eve were commanded not to partake of the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil. In Genesis 2:17 He told them, “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” By disobeying and eating of the fruit of that tree, Adam and Eve did not simply break a rule. They severed themselves from spiritual life in union with God as surely as severing a major artery can kill the body. Just as a mortally wounded person may continue to live and act for a short while though his fate is sealed, Adam and Eve left Eden with a deadly wound that could only have one conclusion: as God told them on the day of their obedience in Genesis 3:19: “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Adam listened to the voice of his love, the Eve who had been formed from his own rib, and his misplaced love, putting her over God, invited death into their bodies.
This death, like a spiritual genetic disease, was passed through our first parents and down to us. The freedom to love and to live was lost, and now, if we look at our own choices in this life, we will see that, according to God’s holy standards, we have all taken that forbidden fruit from the tree. James 1:15 lays out the process of death which unfolds inevitably through each of us: “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” We may like to tell ourselves that we are good, and surely we do strive to be good and do many good things. But the fact that we will all die shows that we are all, like our first parents, outside of Eden.
When Christians receive baptism and partake of Holy Communion, we are sealed with the sign of the new life which only Christ can provide to answer the deadly sin that dwells within us. Although our bodies still succumb to death, if we are in Christ, we partake of a new life that will be fulfilled when we are resurrected on the Last Day. That will be the Great and Final Easter Day, when we put on the fullness of the resurrected life which we have received in Christ. But why remember our mortality by placing ashes on our forehead? Didn’t Jesus tell us not to disfigure our faces in today’s reading? Well, Jesus was talking about a flamboyant form of penance in the second lesson today, where for many days people would stand in the street, covering their faces with ashes and making a big to-do out of their righteousness. It was really a form of bragging about their fasting. But we know that Christ fasted for 40 days in the wilderness, and when reprimanding towns for failing to repent he says in Matthew 11:21: “For if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes” (also recorded in Luke 10:13). Christ was not forbidding the use of ashes to signal fasting and repentance, but explaining that our heart should be in the right place – that we rend our hearts with an inward sense of the intolerable weight of our sin as we raise our solemn litany to the Lord. Unlike Communion, one need not be a Christian to receive the imposition of ashes, because the reminder of our mortality urgently calls us all to the foot of the cross.
Let me explain it this way. If I show you a bottle of water right now, you probably won’t find it terribly interesting. You’re seated and comfortable and listening. You probably didn’t lick your lips with thirst when I mentioned a bottle of water. However, if we all went and ran ten laps around the church building, this water would suddenly look very inviting. In the same way, by remembering our mortality through the imposition of ashes today and the fasts we may choose to take on this Lent, we are remembering what makes us hunger and thirst for the body and blood of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. We remember what makes our spirits long for the nourishing power of God’s word when we remember that the words of life in Scripture are the answer for the death in our bodies.Hebrews 9:13-14 reminds us that ashes point to Christ as the true sacrifice: “13 For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: 14 How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” Given that the ashes are from the palms which celebrated Christ’s kingship, I can’t think of a more powerful testimony to the fact that animal sacrifice is over and it is the kingship of Christ which lays victory over the curse of death. Those palm branches are a symbol of Christ’s authority, an authority which we treated as burned up and of as little value as a pile of ashes when we chose sin instead of Christ’s goodness. But we also remember that Christ chose to let His sacred body lay in dust in the tomb so that He could bring life back to us. Yes, we remember that “We were made from the dust and to the dust we shall return.” But those words of the curse in Genesis 3:19 invoke the context of Genesis 3:15, the prophecy of the overcoming of the curse: “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” The ashes remind us of the enmity which dwells in our flesh, and so turn us more earnestly to the victorious bruising in the head of Satan, death, and sin that was achieved in the Death and Resurrection of Christ.Christ said, “I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades” (Revelation 1:18), and the sign of the cross is an acknowledgement of my sin-cursed need for Christ’s power over death and Hell for me to say with Paul, “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55). For Easter Sunday to be more than a show, we need to face the shadowing gloom of the truth underscored by the author of Hebrews – we are appointed once to die, and then the judgment. Here is a Valentine’s Day gift from Christ to His Bride the Church, greater than any box of chocolates or bouquet of flowers: the imposition of ashes in the form of a cross stands as testament to the place where a confrontation with our mortality intersects with Christ’s triumph as the great sacrifice which the “ashes of an heifer” could never achieve. Through death, Christ’s love becomes our life. We do not boast of our repentance like the hypocrites, but we receive those cross-shaped ashes to remind ourselves that it is Christ’s death which washes and will wash our death away so that we can live more abundantly now, and serves as a sober Valentine promise that one day we will live that Easter life where sin and death will reign no more. Amen.