Ash Wednesday 2024

Lectionary: 219

Rend your hearts, not your garments,
and return to the LORD, your God.
For gracious and merciful is he,
slow to anger, rich in kindness,
and relenting in punishment.
Perhaps he will again relent
and leave behind him a blessing,
Offerings and libations
for the LORD, your God.

We bring to Lent a sense of crisis, a fear of immanent danger, and an intuition that something must be done -- now! Now is the appropriate time. February of 2024 is especially laden with anxiety. 

However, it is an anxiety which is easily allayed, for anxiety is nothing more than fear unrecognized and unnamed. And we know what we fear; we fear the Lord -- who is slow to anger, rich in kindness, and relenting in punishment. 

Our first reading from Joel suggests the Lord might -- he uses the word perhaps -- relent and leave behind a blessing. We're neither engineers, nor mechanics, nor magicians; and our god is not an impersonal, manipulable force which can be managed. 

And we're glad of that for our God is a person in some sense like us. (We use the word person for lack of a better description of the One who has created us in his own image.) If we don't like to be managed or manipulated, we're not likely to attempt any manipulation of our Good God. Rather, we approach him with the confidence of children who have found endless patience in "Our Father," and a sympathetic understanding of our stubborn foolishness. 

Wisely, the Lord did not make us invulnerable against every threat; for if we had no need for God we would not know or expect his merciful kindness. Rather, we are like sheep readily led astray by evil and spooked by every threat, but as readily led into righteousness. 

Lent invites us to consider our lives and discover our sins in the light of God's goodness. We are called to be a holy people and we have failed. If we need any reminder of that, we have only to listen to our critics in the news media. They continually harp on everything that is wrong with humankind in general and the Church in particular. It sells newspapers, merchandise, and services of every sort; but it's also good for us to stop and hear their complaints. 

If we're tempted to ignore the news media for their flagrant cynicism, we should nonetheless listen to our God. Each morning our Liturgy of the Hours begins with a plea and a complaint: 

Oh, that today you would hear his voice,

Do not harden your hearts as at Meribah,

as on the day of Massah in the desert.

There your ancestors tested me;

they tried me though they had seen my works.

Forty years I loathed that generation;

I said: “This people’s heart goes astray;

they do not know my ways. 

Therefore I swore in my anger:

“They shall never enter my rest.” (Psalm 95)

There's nothing new about sin or God's complaint; what is new is our readiness to turn away from sin and live by the Gospel. We hear our marching orders in the Gospel of Saint Matthew; we must pray, fast, do good works.

"Here am I Lord, I come to do your will!"