The young preacher noticed that one of his elderly parishioners never came up for ashes on Ash Wednesday. One day, while visiting him, the pastor asked him why he didn’t. The old man replied, “I already got mine.” Then he pointed to an urn on a small brown table. ”That’s my wife. I don’t need ashes to remind me of sin and death. I’m reminded every day, and I can’t wait to see her again.”
That man truly understood Ash Wednesday. He’d been carrying his ashes for years.
Perhaps some of you don’t need ashes either this Lent. But some of us do. We might as well face the facts now before experience teaches us. We are destroyers, makers of ashes. We are destroyed, dying, and mortal. We need a savior! We are ashes who don’t just need a doctor or life coach but a miracle, someone who can raise the dead.
In the end, we are that old man and his wife—a pile of ashes when it’s all said and done. All our accomplishments and awards, failures, and sins are rubble. All the things you hoped in or clung to are rubble. Even your own righteousness is rubble. It all fits in this little box: Ashes. Dead. Cold. Lifeless.
It’s inevitable. Why wait? Why continue the facade of pretending you are something you are not? Why continue the facade that you are righteous? Why continue pretending that you aren’t going to die?
Jesus tells us that whoever saves his life will lose it. And whoever loses his life for my sake will save it! Jesus has come to give us life, but He also invites us to die! You are going to die anyway. Jesus gives us the gift of dying now. Let go of thinking you can get out of the place by your own cunning, savings, or even good deeds. It’s all ashes.
And only in Ashes do we find Jesus! When our dreams are crushed. When we fall into sin. When we suffer. There’s Jesus. Every time. Jesus isn’t giving good advice when He tells people that when they lose their life for his sake they will find it. He promises it!
He’s not just referring to the end but those times of dying in our lives. There, we will find Life, forgiveness, comfort, and meaning. Knowing we are forgiven and will one day not suffer allows us to embrace the day today as living people.
You will have ashes on your head one way or the other. Yet we have something more significant than ashes to point us to Christ. St. Paul says it perfectly in Romans 6. “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”
