This week marks the beginning of Lent.¹ I appreciate how the church calendar embraces all the somber elements of Jesus’s life and ours. It doesn’t try to deny the realities of sadness, grief, or death, but it places them in a story that acknowledges them even as it provides hope. Hope arises from the places of darkness, because that’s when we need it.
That’s the tension we hold. The somber seasons are at once valid in their own right and a prelude to the resurrection. Lent is given four whole weeks and Easter has seven. Neither cancels the other out. In fact, resurrection does not happen without death. Resurrection presupposes something died even as healing assumes someone was sick and restoration assumes something was broken.
Lent is a relief to me because it means I don’t have to pretend. I don’t have to pretend my life is perfect or my relationships are always thriving or my body is in perfect condition or our justice system is always fair or natural disasters aren’t devastating. I don’t have to tell myself all is right in the world because it is not. Lent acknowledges it is not.
Yet, even as seasons like Lent are steadying, the reminder of death is scary and uncomfortable. I think it’s meant to be. Think of it: we walk up to the front of the church, and along with every other person in the room, including the priest, we receive ashes on our forehead in the shape of a cross–a weapon of torture–while the minister looks at us and says, “You are dust and to dust you shall return.”
Ash Wednesday is the somber sound of our own mortality. It calls us back to reality: we are finite and we are dying.
Tish Harrison Warren says the first time she put ashes on a child’s forehead, she wept the rest of the service.² In her book, Prayer in the Night, she writes, “I hope it keeps breaking my heart every time I mark someone with a reminder of death because the power of Death is heartbreaking. It’s not a fact that we should get used to. It’s worth our weeping.”3
Death was our indomitable enemy, one that fully overtook Jesus. Death had such power that only his resurrection could overcome it.
When he rose, Jesus transformed the meaning of the cross. It’s a visceral reminder of death, yes, but a subversive promise of life, too. The cross-shaped ashes confound the ways we try to avoid death and they promise hope when death is all we see.
Resurrection doesn’t prevent the heartbreak of death; it doesn’t cancel out the pain of the world. Nor is it a weapon to use against the hurting. Instead, Jesus’s resurrection is the hope that death is not the final word in any of our lives. While death may be part of the story, it’s not the whole of it. Not even close.
¹ Lent is the season of the church year that begins at Ash Wednesday and extends to holy week, the week of Jesus’s death. Lent is forty days of fasting, confession, and repentance.
² p. 122
3 p. 123
Leave a Reply