Sunday 1 March 2020

Ash Wednesday



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



No comments:

Post a Comment