What is in me that needs to die before I die? Lent, for all its caricatures of giving up chocolate or not drinking so much red wine, is the seasonal embodiment of Jesus’ promise that those who wish to find their life must lose it. Lent is a journey away from petty idolatries and distractions towards a life focused on the Jesus way—the way of sacrifice and meekness, the way that , incidentally, happens to lead to truth and life. As Christians around the world receive the ashes tomorrow and we hear the sobering words, “Remember from dust you have come and to dust you shall return,” we are not engaging in an exercise of cynical fatalism or morbid asceticism. Nor are we merely wallowing in self-righteous self-pity. Rather, we are taking the first step, with Jesus, towards Jerusalem: towards the upper room, towards Gethsemane and Golgotha, and ultimately, the empty tomb.
The ashen cross smudged on the foreheads of faithful children, women, and men declares with the psalmist that we are but a breath, a flower cut from the bush that dies as soon as it flourishes (Ps. 103). Furthermore, we wear the dark marks of our humanity and our failure to live in proper relationship with God, one another, and creation. We have sinned and sin leaving mangled relationships in every part of its scorched-earth wake needs more than just a simple, “sorry.” Ash Wednesday, as the gateway to the lenten season, is a funeral for our idolatrous lives, the clear-eyed acknowledgment that we have sinned and we will die. We clothe ourselves in ashes and sackcloth mourning our own shortcomings, repenting of our sins. And yet underlying even this judgment is an indescribable current of hope that looks to a day when God himself will clothe our feeble mortal bodies with the imperishable garments of eternity (1 Cor. 15).
When I, as a pastor, impose the ashes, I look into the face of people I love and walk with everyday and tell them one of the two or three truest things I am capable of saying to them: “You are going to die.” When Christ talked to his disciples of his impending sacrifice he followed up with an equally cryptic statement: “But in three days I will rise again” (Mark 8:31). The Messiah, according to Peter and many of his contemporaries, was supposed to restore the Kingdom. He couldn’t exactly manage those affairs from the grave. But the disciples, as a microcosm for the world at large, fail to understand what Jesus is telling them. When Jesus is telling his disciples, “I am going to die,” he is in the same breath saying, “I am going to live and you are too!” We would have God form a bureaucracy and give us a cushy job. Instead he offers us himself and his eternal kingdom. God’s life offered to us is always better than the one we would dream up for ourselves. Even our imaginations need resurrecting.
But first, the dying. There is no get-rich-quick scheme in the kingdom of God, no life-hacks for eternity. There is no way to resurrection except through death. Jesus, as the incarnate Son of God, died everyday to his own wants and desires and submitted to the will of the Father. Lent is a 40-day period where we practice the art of dying well—the art of dying like Jesus. But just as Jesus’ death is not ultimately about death, we don’t die merely for the sake of dying. We die so that we may live. We fast so that we may feast. We deny ourselves so that we might share. We allow the Spirit to do meticulous surgery on our hearts so that those renewed hearts might beat for God and for others. So the question of lent remains what needs to die in us before we die? What needs to die in us so that we may live? “The world is not conclusion,” Emily Dickinson wrote. Death is not the end. But the only way to resurrection is to come and die.