How many here showed up for ashes this past Wednesday? I’ll bet almost all of us – and a lot of others besides, people we may seldom even see on other days! It has to be one of the great examples of the Church’s liturgical genius that it can take something so unattractive (but so true) as our inevitable return to dust, and ritualize it so effectively every Lent.
Now back when Lent really was exactly 40 days (before Ash Wednesday and the 3 following days got added on), Lent began on this Sunday, and the 40 days are in fact still counted beginning with today.
So, every year on this day, we are invited to begin our Lent the way Jesus began his public life and mission – not in flamboyant miracles, exciting accomplishments, and public acclaim, but in the threatening silence and solitude of the desert. The Judean desert is a harsh and somewhat forbidding place – hot and sunny by day, cold and dark by night, silent as death. That was where Jesus made his Lent and where he invites us (symbolically at least) to join him for ours. Every Lent, the same Spirit that drove Jesus out into the desertleads us to spend these 40 days with him among the wild beasts that threaten and challenge us to choose what to make of our lives.
According to the biblical account of human origins, Adam had originally lived peacefully among those same wild beasts – his food provided, according to Jewish legend, by angels. Jesus’ sojourn among the wild beasts with angels ministering to him, tells us that God’s original plan is still in place – despite whatever obstacles we put in his way.
That’s the point of the story of Noah. Despite all the obstacles people put in God’s way, in his mercy God patiently waited during the building of the ark, in which a few persons, eight in all, were saved. God then went even further and made a covenant of mercy and forgiveness with Noah and his descendants, restraining his just anger, to guarantee the continuance of life on earth.
In Jesus, however, God does more than just restrain his anger. He actually undoes the damage done by human sinfulness, descending into the prison of death to free its victims. Jesus’ descent among the dead anticipates the final fulfillment of his mission: “The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.”
That’s what Lent is all about because that’s what life is ultimately all about. One Ash Wednesday some years ago, I overheard someone explaining Lent as “a time to get connected with ourselves.” Well, Lent is a time to renew ourselves. But we do that by focusing not on ourselves, but on the big picture, and where we want to be in that picture. Lent is our special time to connect with Christ – Christ tempted in the desert and victorious on the cross, Christ descended among the dead and risen at the right hand of his Father – and to allow that experience, his experience to make a real difference in our lives, because the kingdom of God really is at hand.
Homily for the First Sunday of Lent, Cathedral of Saint Andrew, Grand Rapids, MI, February 18, 2024.
