Most of what we talk about on Ash Wednesday is found in the small part of the Sermon on the Mount we get in the lectionary (Matthew 6:1-6,16-21). The rest of the chapter reveals it means so much more.
Ash Wednesday is way more than ashes – it’s the work of forgiveness
Ash Wednesday | Matthew 6:1-6,16-21
Every year we hear this gospel about almsgiving and secret prayer. But we hear it outside of its bigger context. In the midst of the Sermon on the Mount, with its incendiary spark in the Beatitudes and its roaring flame at the end of chapter 5, in a call to love our enemies.
This is not some simple talk of piety or a mandate of behavior—this is the voice of one trying to reorient the world away from selfish bitterness and outward approval and toward a God whose love is beyond our comprehension.
This is your Ash Wednesday gospel. It’s supposed to be an accelerant on a flame already building.
Jesus reminds us that we have a say in how we love and pray, and move in this world. We are actors in the drama—and our work shapes everything around us.
That’s what Jesus preaches in the chapter before this. What happens in the middle is something so painfully missing, it is criminal we don’t proclaim it with the rest each year:
On Praying
‘When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
‘Pray then in this way:
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not bring us to the time of trial,
but rescue us from the evil one.
For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
Pray, he says, for forgiveness: for our forgiveness of others to reflect the unwarranted forgiveness we’re given.
Then Jesus gets into fasting, storing up treasures, being blinded by the darkness of unhealthy obsessions, demanding we choose between two masters: God and wealth.
Chapter 6 of Matthew is a bonfire! It’s ruckus. And most of our peers are worrying about whether or not we get ashes on our foreheads without the traditional liturgy or whether or not we wipe them off before we leave.
Those are the usual conversations we have on Ash Wednesday.
But if we’re to listen to Jesus—if we’re to do what God says to the disciples in the Transfiguration: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” We better not make like the disciples and pretend like he’s just blowing smoke when he’s really torching the place.
Forgiveness
What makes this middle section with the Lord’s Prayer so important to us on Ash Wednesday is how central forgiveness is to the gospel and our work in this Lenten Season.
We are reminded every year that we prepare ourselves for reconciliation. We prepare ourselves for dealing with forgiveness.
This isn’t ramping ourselves up to see if we can forgive. Forgiveness is a given. We don’t get to choose not to forgive. We’re way past that.
Do we forgive 7 times? No, 77 times. Remember—this is Jesus’s way of telling Peter to get with the program. Forgiveness needs to be easier than that. Because the bigger thing comes after it.
Reconciliation. That’s way bigger.
We can forgive, because that’s all on us. Each of us can simply declare forgiveness and move on either way, regardless of whether or not it’s true. We can make a big show of forgiving without it really mattering if it’s true.
But reconciliation coordinates a meet-up between the sinner and the community broken by that sin.
Because sin isn’t the adultery, theft, or the hatred—it’s the break in the relationship. Sin is the separation between us and between each of us and God. Sin is what breaks us apart—and quite literally is the break itself.
We’re entering the season of exploring sin—precisely how sin breaks us apart and how forgiveness is the glue which brings us back together, to reconcile us.
Sin
In Lent, we explore sin because the work of reconciliation is at the very heart of our faith. We are forgiven, so we forgive. We are loved, so we love. All that we have been given is what we offer to the world.
And this is the season we explore that motif. But not only as academics, but also as practitioners of the gospel. We explore it in our bodies, our emotions, our intuitions. We do all the internal work so we can actually look ourselves in the mirror and admit our sin and thank God for forgiveness.
And we make our confession and we seek absolution. Literally, physically, liturgically, emotionally, spiritually, with our whole selves.
Do Not Worry
Chapter 6 ends with instruction to not worry.
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”
That’s a funny thing to hear on a fast day which begins a season of fasting. To hear Jesus say not to worry what you eat!
But his point isn’t the food or the fast. It’s on the worry.
“Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.”
It isn’t the how, the metaphysics, the measurable outside of that it happens. Focus on the instruction: do not worry. Do not engage in worrying.
“But strive first for the kingdom of God and its righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”
Do not worry, but strive for the kin-dom.
This Lent, walk with me in exploring sin, repentance, prayer, reconciliation, and love. Take these ashes as a reminder of the fragility of life, but also their earthier connection. Our earthier connection.
That we are all from the earth, like the first human brought from the earth. Remember that we are all part of creation, part of the disordered seeking to be reordered, sinful and the graceful, returning and reconciling with our creator.
Receive these as a reminder of God’s love for us and the imploring desire for us to love each other. For we all come from the earth, we are born and live to love.
May we spend these 40 days simplifying our lives and smoothing the rough spots and plotting schemes of forgiveness that we might anticipate the return of love into our lives and rebuild God’s delivery-systems of forgiveness: us.
And we remember today so that we’ll know that love and deliver that love. For the rest of our lives.