Co-missioners,
We were about to keep our promise to send you a companion piece to last week’s post when the item below dropped into our editor’s mailbox. One quick glance, and that first set of plans went out the window.
What you’re getting today instead is a reflection on Ash Wednesday. It’s so sharp, so urgent, that we couldn’t imagine putting it on hold. This year’s Ash Wednesday, of course, is a mere six days away, so we got the writer’s permission to let us expedite delivery (so to speak).
The Rev. Dr. Marcus Kunz is the writer in question. This is his first contribution to Thursday Theology. Marcus has been participating for the past year or two in our monthly Table Talk sessions. When we asked for a few words that would introduce him to all of you, he sent the following:
I am an ELCA pastor who has served alongside congregations, synod colleagues and churchwide staff. Although nearing retirement, I continue to serve part-time with the churchwide organization, holding an overly long and fancy job title. When I once tried to describe the work to a colleague, he said it sounded like the work of a law clerk—which of course I’m not—but I thought immediately of “gospel clerk,” and I think that aptly describes the work I am privileged to do.
As it happens, Marcus’s submission included extended reflections on the Gospel and Epistle readings for Ash Wednesday, both of these framed by “the cross made of ashes” that he’ll discuss here today. In the coming weeks of Lent we hope to send you both of those reflections. We’ll also deliver the piece you’d have gotten today had it not been for Marcus’s gift—so sudden, so unexpected; so very much appreciated!
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
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Framing Ash Wednesday with the Cross of Ashes
by Marcus Kunz
As I work with the Scriptures and read what others hear in them, I have noticed a distinctive shift in modern interpretation of the readings for Ash Wednesday—specifically, a shift in emphasis from sin, guilt, repentance, and forgiveness to mortality, baptism, and renewal of life. This shift allows a different framing of the readings appointed for this day and the singular act of making the sign of the cross on the forehead with ash.
It is likely true that some of the older and more familiar framing of the Lenten season has been unhelpful, maybe even unfaithful, especially when a misdirected emphasis on moralizing exhortation has degenerated into abusive shaming and obscured Gospel proclamation. At the same time, I am unconvinced that a reframing that deflects discussion of human culpability and pushes toward human innocence and vindication is a more helpful and faithful opening of these Scriptures.
Nor does this reframing adequately express the symbol that gives this day its name. The words spoken while ashes are applied to the foreheads of participants in worship on this day—“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return” (Gen 3:19)—are so much more than mere reminders of mortality. If they are heard primarily or only as that and nothing more, then a complex and powerful message is being buried.
- The words from Genesis 3, spoken by YHWH, are first a reminder of origin and “original blessing”—the blessing of creaturehood, the blessing of being breathed into life by God’s own Spirit. Admittedly, the remembrance of dust can be heard as if it were nothing more than a schoolyard shaming—“you dirtbag.” It is, however, a poignant reminder of lost dignity and blessing: you had a Creator who breathed into you the life force that moves all creation and you held the unmatched dignity of beloved creature. You abandoned that life-giving relationship in a quest to be your own god (aka “Me, Myself and I”). In that you became a deserter of God, a traitor against yourself, a mere shadow of what you once were, nothing more than desiccated, desecrated dust.
In other words, ashes are not merely a mark of mortality, but rather of being people who burned it all down. Ashes are the substance that marks arsonists, destroyers—the creatures whose ill-begotten quest to be their own gods (Gen 3:5) has made a burnt offering of the blessing in being creatures of a generous, life-giving and sustaining Creator, sacrificed at the altar of an idol: Me, Myself and I.
- That’s bad enough, but there’s more. One could make just a smudge on the forehead, I suppose, as a sign of sacrificed blessing. However, the sign we make with the ashes is a cross. It refers to a specific practice—crucifixion—and one instance of that practice in particular, the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth.
From Canva
Even at the distance of two millennia, it’s clear that this particular instance makes people so uneasy that various kinds of deflections are employed to maintain a distance. The old scapegoating of “the Jews” for Jesus’ crucifixion has given way to scapegoating Roman imperialist actors and their lackeys. However, all four of the canonical passion narratives make clear that, even if only several dozen actors were immediately involved, a few hundred at most, everyone had a hand or a voice in the humiliating rejection of Jesus, the herald of God’s mercy. The gospel narratives show it in the successive rejections, betrayals and condemnations of the Sanhedrin (the religious leadership), then Herod and Pilate (the occupying imperial power and its local collaborationist government), even Jesus’ own closest companions (Judas’s betrayal, Peter’s denial, abandonment by the rest), and finally the “crowd” (that is, everyone else). Yes, generations before and after were not physically present in the events of that day in Jerusalem. Still the rejection that led to crucifying others in idolatrous service of self-interest, self-vindication, and self-righteousness has always found equivalents. Public stonings, public burnings at stakes, public hangings on gallows and other forms of lynching whose purpose is not simply murder, but public, terrifying, devastating humiliation and rejection.
Nor does the excuse “I’ve never done that” suffice. We have all been witnesses of and partners in the humiliating rejections of schoolyard and workplace and online bullying, of gratuitous shaming at gatherings of family and friends, of scapegoating the vulnerable and defenseless. It’s the same idolatry that is at work in crucifying, etc., the same actor and purpose: to establish ourselves as the righteously supreme judge, the giver and taker of life and its blessings. A cross made with ashes marks humankind for who we are in our idolatry. We are crucifiers.
- There is still more. When Jesus was crucified for the blasphemy of speaking the forgiveness that only God can give (the charge made against Jesus both at the beginning of his ministry and at his trial at the end of life; see Mk 2:1-12, 14:60-64; and parallels in Matthew and Luke), it was the rejection of who God chose to be for humankind in the person of Jesus—forgiving mercy proclaimed, embodied, and enacted. The rejection of Jesus was and is the rejection of that mercy and, as with humankind’s first rebellion, that God.
This is where once again the appointed psalm provides hermeneutical guidance for this day, its primary symbol, and its assigned readings: “against you, against only you, have I sinned” (Ps 51:4). The grammatical construction—a kind of word fragment “against you” (leka) followed by the full word “against only you” (lebaddeka) prevents any misconstrual. In the matter of this cross on our foreheads, we are marked as crucifiers of God.
- There is yet more signified in this cross of ashes. It marks how far Jesus went in faithfulness to God’s forgiving mercy, how much rejection he would endure and yet remain forgiving. It marks the full measure of God’s mercy in Christ, the full “breadth and length and height and depth” of what can be hoped for and prayed for from this rejected God. Again, Psalm 51 points the way: a cleansed heart, a righted spirit, the Holy Spirit’s presence, the saving, generous, “free Spirit” that is from “only you” (Ps 51:10-12). “We proclaim Christ crucified,” the apostle Paul wrote, because “God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are so that … [God] is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Cor 1:28-30). In other words, we are marked as the ones whose hope of rising to life rests in being crucified with Christ (Gal 2:19).
I imagine that the usual image associated with framing is a window frame (like a Johari window, for instance). It sets the boundaries for discussion, what’s inside and outside the frame, defining what will be considered and what will not. This cross of ash, however, is a different kind of framing. Its very structure points in multiple directions—toward ourselves, God, our actions toward others, and who God chooses to be for us in Jesus—and the horizon is open to new, perhaps unimaginable possibility, including that “justice” (dikaiosunē) is found in the crucified one who died for the ungodly (Rom 5:6-11). The readings appointed for this day can undoubtedly be framed and heard in many ways. [I propose in coming posts] to frame them with this cross of ash, with what it proclaims, and what it opens for our hearing.
