The churches I grew up in didn’t observe Ash Wednesday, or any religious calendar dates except for Christmas and Easter. The generation of leaders before me pushed back on ritual and tradition, mainly because things done out of routine can often lose their meaning. However, I think we’ve at times “thrown the baby out with the bath water” and failed to recognize important dates and seasons that the church has celebrated for much of its history.
Ash Wednesday is one of those days, and it is held 40 days before Easter, marking the beginning of the season of Lent. In many liturgical churches, Ash Wednesday is observed with a solemn service and the imposition of Ashes on the forehead, reminding us of our mortality.
In the Bible, people put ashes on their head to demonstrate repentance from sin and grief over death. We don’t use ashes today, and our culture does not have an equivalent piece of makeup. And of course we don’t! We use makeup to cover up our flaws—to pretend we aren’t the imperfect, broken, dying people that we are—which ashes smeared on your forehead so perfectly communicates!
As a result, you might be tempted to pass from mourning over your sin and considering your own mortality, but Paul exhorts us in Ephesians to “pay careful attention to how you live—not as unwise people but as wise—making the most of the time, because the days are evil.” In these “evil days,” Ash Wednesday forces us to pause and reflect on the following:
There is sin in me.
The Christian doctrine of original sin tells us that we don’t just commit sin sometimes; we have a sin nature on the inside of us. The Apostle John says “if we say we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.”
After the fall, our desires were corrupted by sin, and there’s no earthly escape. While we are saved from the effects of sin through Christ (and will one day be saved from the presence of sin in our physical bodies) we still live this life battling the iniquity (“bentness”) that exists in us. In fact, a major part of Christian discipleship is identifying the sin that exists inside of you and waging war against it.
My sin grieves God.
Second, we need to realize that our sin grieves God, because God’s holiness and our sin cannot coexist. Sin is in essence rejecting God. That’s what Adam and Eve did in the garden, by choosing their own will over God’s plan. (Sin = rebellion.) Human sin caused a break in the love relationship that God sought with us, and thankfully Jesus came to fix it. But even if we are found “in Christ”, every time we sin we are pushing God away in that moment.
My sin should grieve me.
Because our sin grieves God, it should grieve us. The fact that we chose some earthly pleasure over choosing God’s plan for us should lead to lamenting our sin. Thomas Watson said, “Until sin becomes bitter, Christ will not be sweet.” Ash Wednesday gives us a chance to sit in the bitterness of our sin and remember, confess, and repent for our sinful thoughts and deeds.
My sin deserves eternal death.
A major part of Ash Wednesday is to remind us of our mortality, due to sin. The greatest human problem today is still the problem of death, and it exists solely because of our sin. When Adam and Eve first sinned, they earned us all the death sentence: “for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
My sin put Jesus on the cross.
Ash Wednesday looks forward to Easter, when God found a way to fix the problem of sin and death. But it came at a great cost.
Death was the unavoidable result of sin. So God sent His Son. And he didn’t come to be a great teacher—he came to die. And the reason he died wasn’t because of his own sin, because he didn’t have any. He died because of our sin.
The good news of the gospel, and the story of Easter, is that God put death to death in the death of Christ. The Father turned his face from his Son so that he could turn his face towards you and me and call us sons and daughters. And then, just as Christ was raised, those who place their faith in Him are made eternally alive, even though they will physically die.
That’s the hope of Ash Wednesday, and it is found in the final saying when the ashes are imposed: “Repent, and believe in the gospel.”
So today, whether you put ashes on or not–take some time to repent. Think about your mortality, and the bad news that your sin brings death. But then, be overwhelmed with gratitude and love for what Christ has done for you–and believe a little deeper in the good news of the gospel.