 Ashes on postmodern heads By Mark Noll © 2001 United Press International Wednesday, February 28, 2001 This is the 11th installment of the UPI series, "Christ and postmodernity."
In a postmodern scheme, we create truth; we do not simply receive what has been given to us. Yet on Wednesday, Feb. 28, hundreds of millions of people around the world did pretty much the same thing for pretty much the same reason. And they did so because previous generations have passed this ceremony down to them. They were suggesting that truth can endure across the centuries. Feb. 28 was Ash Wednesday, in the Western Christian calendar the beginning of Lent. Ash Wednesday and Lent are observed more consistently among Catholics than Protestants, but in recent years an increasing number of the latter also has been marking the day and the season. For Christians, these special times in the calendar call upon humans to change what they do because of what God in Christ has done for them. Lent points toward the great events of the Passion Week – the betrayal, the trial, the persecution, the crucifixion, the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Lent asks for special concentration of mind, and even real changes in behavior, as a way of preparing for the commemoration of these climactic events. Because of what happened nearly 2000 years ago, Christians believe they are to be different – and live differently – today. Ash Wednesday and Lent came into existence to encourage such responses to the Passion. More than 1,000 years ago, the church began to set aside the weeks before Easter as a special time of repentance. It may have been in the very first Christian centuries that these observances began. A common practice in this special season was to read selected texts from the Hebrew Scriptures that Christians call the Old Testament. One of them was taken from Isaiah, "Is not this the fast that I choose to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free?" (Isaiah 58:6). Originally, however, Lent was not for everyone. It was for people who had committed extraordinary public sins and had been excommunicated – or formally dismissed from the fellowship of believers. Ash Wednesday was the day when these excommunicated ones could be brought back into the church. It began a season of worship services where the excommunicated performed special acts of penitence, including dressing in sackcloth (a kind of burlap) and covering themselves with ashes to show that they were sorry for their sins. The other believers fasted and prayed for the excommunicated ones. All of this activity pointed toward the actual restoration of repentant Christians who had been excommunicated. Sometime during Lent there would be a special service of reconciliation during which the excommunicated were readmitted. The leaders of worship would lay hands on their excommunicated brethren. They would be prayed for and then once again they would join fellow believers in celebrating together the Lord's Supper (Holy Communion). Such services of public repentance could have a great effect. So impressive, in fact, were the services that very soon the pressure grew to let all faithful share in such an experience. The ashes that had been preserved for excommunicated public sinners now were given to all. It was clear that ordinary sins and ordinary rebellion against God needed repentance and the restoration of faith, too. Thus was born the season of Lent as a time of special reflection on the need of all to repent, to turn from evil and to take refuge in Christ. Ash Wednesday was the day to inaugurate this special season. Special prayers and readings were said as the faithful came to be marked on the forehead with ashes in the sign of a cross. Most were a variation on, "Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return." But why, in this age of self-affirmation, fret over repentance for sins? How can such an ancient ceremony still make sense in a postmodern world? What is the point of it all? The Christian response about the need for repentance is quite clear. Unless we acknowledge our sin before God, believers testify, we cannot enjoy God. Richard John Neuhaus has written a moving book of meditations on the seven last words from the cross in which he takes up the question. As Neuhaus puts it, "To belittle our sins is to belittle ourselves, to belittle who it is that God creates and calls us to be. To belittle our sins is to belittle their forgiveness, to belittle the love of the Father who welcomes us home." We repent, so the church says, because unless we acknowledge our sin we cannot know the one who rescues us from sin. We repent because unless we acknowledge our sin, we cannot know the Savior. As for carrying ancient rituals into a postmodern era, Ash Wednesday and Lent may be as relevant now as ever. A fascination with power and its abuses characterizes almost all postmodern thinking. To these concerns, the cross of Christ should be a marvel. It presents abject powerlessness of the kind that so infuriated Nietzsche and is such a puzzle to the socio-biologists as a positive good. The cross wins people not by taking but by giving. At the end of the day, the cross is not a symbol of postmodernity, but what it stands for – as affirmation through loss – should speak to the postmodern condition. Postmodernists also are keen on the tremendous differences dividing human beings. Again, while not able to go the full distance with most versions of postmodernism, Christians can point to the cross as an affirmation of astounding human diversity. The human race has demonstrated an all but infinite creativity in its sins. Yet, all are welcome – all may stand together even with the fullest differences possible – at the foot of the cross. The point of Ash Wednesday and of the Lenten season that follows is to change us as we contemplate the cross. The little sign that is made with the ashes speaks for an immense reality. As the apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians, the cross reveals a humanly unbelievable truth: "The Son of God loved me and gave himself for me." It is the cross of Christ that calls for repentance and makes possible repentance. His death on the cross means that we may have spiritual life. Because he suffered for sin that he did not commit, we are freed from the sins that we every day commit. And so it is that the cross, a symbol of vile suffering, can become for the Christian an occasion of joy. For Christian believers, Ash Wednesday is a sober day. It inaugurates a season of self-denial. But the message, above all, is of faith, hope and love. Prof. Mark Noll teaches history at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill. |
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