On Our Way Somewhere

Ash Wednesday.  It is a beautiful practice of the church, this marking of our foreheads with a cross of ash.  We remember our mortality…dust we are and to dust we shall return.  Our time is not endless here.  We remember our sin and repent.  Our choices here matter.  We remember He who came on our behalf, setting aside His glory to become one of us.  

For Jesus, the forty days in the wilderness was a time of fasting to feast on pure nourishment and drawing away to draw close.  But the journey there had immediately followed the gloriously fluid baptism and the grand announcement that His Father was most pleased with Him.  You’d think that moment would lead to a party, not a fast. 

The end of His desert visit would see the arrival of the tests, when His own human resources were as dry as the sandy terrain.  It was when He was spent that those decisions came to the table and He chose not to accept help from an enemy who was oh so ready to suggest easy substitutes and fast food meals.  Jesus chose to believe and to put His weight (even if it was several pounds lighter) on God, whether that meal would be manna or feast.

We begin our own forty days here today.  We acknowledge our limitations and our sin, we turn ourselves to Him to sit and learn.  We set aside lesser things to have a taste of something real. 

The ashen cross we will wear today will be hard to remember unless we are willing to face ourselves in the mirror and look ourselves in the eye.  We will see it on others though, and remember that their struggles and failed attempts to do this life successfully on their own is as futile as ours.  But this beautiful cross, today a more honest one that hasn’t been cleaned up and polished, reassures us that we are not alone.  God came to rescue us by going the full span of humanity, through death, down into the ground to complete His mission.  We remember that He got dirty (and bloody) and took the punishment on our behalf.  We turn and face and yield and receive.  We die.  We live.