As I expect you know, we make the
ash we use on Ash Wednesday by burning some of last year’s palm crosses. It’s a
reminder that so many of the promises we made to follow Christ last year as we
held them up, have come to dust and ashes. We meant well, but actually this is
what we have to show for all our efforts. And it’s a small pile of ashes at
that. I burned 8 or 9 palm crosses this year. They made quite a sizeable pile,
but all that remains is this, a tiny pot of ash. And every year, I have a
moment of panic. Will it be enough to ash us all?
But every year I find that, yes, it
will be fine, because the truth is that a little ash goes a long way.
Or to put it another way, you don’t
need much dirt to make a lot of people of people messy.
Like the Gospel story we heard
today.
Here is one woman caught in
adultery, one woman in a mess, but actually Jesus sees that the mess is not
just located in her. Her mess reflects a mess – in fact is a projection of the
mess - that everyone else in the story is caught up in too.
For a start, where is the man she
has been caught in adultery with? It takes two to tango. But she seems to be
carrying his guilt as well as her own.
And then there are all those who
are accusing her. How did they come to be so vindictive and bitter? Why are
they so furious? Jesus realises that here again, they are projecting their own
mess onto her. As we discover none of them is “without sin”. When they are
challenged, they slip away, the oldest first. The older you get the fewer
illusions you can have about your own perfection, maybe.
If we could unpick the motives of
those involved in this situation – the woman, her lover, her accusers, we would
find vast tangles of hurt, hate and disappointment, which has twisted the lives
of those involved to the point that they could do what they have done.
I don’t really buy the idea of
original sin, if by that we mean some sort of infection passed down the
generations like a genetic disease from Adam and Eve. For a start it depends on
their being a literal Adam and Eve, which I think misunderstands the way myths
work.
But I do buy the idea that the
world we all grow up in is twisted and tangled by pain and fear. It was twisted
and tangled long before we arrived in it, and that means that, with the best
will in the world, however much we try, however much our parents try, however
much anyone tries, we will all end up twisted and tangled too, and that will twist
and tangle the world for future generations too.
Like the people in this Gospel
story, we get hurt and pass on that hurt to others in our turn. However much we want to do good and be good,
the raw truth is that we will fail, through negligence, through weakness,
through our own deliberate fault, as the confession says. We will do so because
we are human and fallible, and because we live in a world where everyone else
is human and fallible too, and has always been so. Our response to that is,
often to beat ourselves up, but even more often to beat others up, to scapegoat
them and blame them in an attempt to offload our misery and shame somewhere,
anywhere, else. Like this ash, a little of which can make a mess of a great
many people, the small things we do wrong and get wrong soon spread and make a
mess of the whole world.
But what we see Jesus doing here is
drawing a line under our scapegoating, our blaming. We don’t know what he
writes in the sand, but what happens next suggests that it is something that
means, to him at least, “enough”. Enough of this blaming and shaming. Enough of
this projecting your guilt onto someone else. Enough.
Later on he will draw that line
again, as he goes to the cross, to take the blame the world throws at him even
though, as the thief crucified next to him says, he has done nothing to deserve
it. Enough, says the cross. It stops here, with me. It’s not fair that it
should do, but it does. It’s not God’s wrath that is satisfied on the cross; it
is our wrath which is soaked up by Jesus as he dies, saying “enough”. It is
finished.
That’s why I have often said that
this day, Ash Wednesday, though it might seem a sombre day, is actually the
most joyful of all in the calendar, because it’s the day which reminds us that
we don’t have to be ok. It’s ok not to be ok. We don’t have to keep anxiously
passing the buck, throwing our mess at other people in the hopes that we can
get rid of it, because we are frightened it will annihilate us. We can be who
we are, mess and all. God can cope with it.
Yes, we are dust and ashes, but we
are beloved dust and ashes, dust and ashes that God cherishes, that he can
breathe new life into, just like he breathed life into the dust which made
Adam. And that is the best news of all. Happy Ash Wednesday! Dust we are and to
dust we shall return, and it is ok that it should be so.
Amen
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