In the Christian yr there are two penitential seasons, times of the yr when Christians are particularly encouraged to take stock of their relationship with God and people things that prevent its flourishing.
The first is Advent, which is the penitential season that precedes Christmas, and the second is Lent, which is the penitential season that precedes Easter.
Lent (which is the season we’re currently in) began on Ash Wednesday – forty-six days before Easter Sunday. Ash Wednesday is so called because on that day ashes are used as a visual symbol of penitence. The ashes are either placed on people’s heads or are used to attract a cross on their foreheads. Traditionally, this ‘imposition of ashes’ is accompanied by the words ‘Remember you might be dust, and to dust you’ll return.’
These words are a deliberate echo of the words utilized by God when addressing Adam in Genesis 3:19:
‘In the sweat of your face you shall eat breadtill you come back to the bottom, for out of it you were taken;you might be dust, and to dust you shall return.’
The setting of those words is the aftermath of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of excellent and evil though Adam has been warned by God that ‘within the day you eat of it you shall die’ (Genesis 2:17).
These words don’t threaten immediate death, but what they do warn is that the results of eating the forbidden fruit can be the death of the soul (the rupturing of a right relationship with God) resulting in physical death and the eventual dissolution of the dead body and its return to the dust of which it was made.
In their original context the words of Genesis 3:19 are addressed to Adam alone. However, because the Bible makes clear, also they are a word addressed to Eve and to all of the human beings who will descend from her and Adam, the collective humanity which the English language has traditionally called ‘man’ (what we now call ‘humankind’).
As CS Lewis explains in his book The Problem of Pain:
‘What man lost by the Fall was his original specific nature. “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” The total organism which had been taken up into his spiritual life was allowed to fall back into the merely natural condition from which, at his making, it had been raised … This condition was transmitted by heredity to all later generations, for it was not simply what biologists call an acquired variation; it was the emergence of a latest sort of man — a latest species, never made by God, had sinned itself into existence. The change which man had undergone was not parallel to the event of a latest organ or a latest habit; it was a radical alteration of his structure, a disturbance of the relation between his component parts, and an internal perversion of one in all them.’
What the normal words used for the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday do is remind those that receive the ashes of the reality that Lewis describes and the still more awful truth that the unconventional alteration of the human structure resulting from the sin described in Genesis 3 signifies that human beings face the prospect not only of physical death on this world, but what the Bible calls ‘the second death’ (Revelation 21:8), being endlessly alienated from God and all this is sweet on the planet to come back.
The Christian Church has traditionally judged it needed to warn people of those awful truths in the beginning of Lent in order that they realise that they should spend Lent ensuring that their relationship with God is such that although they could die physically they may not then experience the second death.
At this point someone might ask: ‘How is it possible for somebody to avoid the second death? You have just said that it’s a prospect that every one human beings should face.’
The answer to this query is that though everyone faces the potential of everlasting death, it isn’t needed that they experience it. This is because God’s relationship with the human race didn’t end at Genesis 3:19.
As St Athanasius explains in his book On the Incarnation of the Word, God couldn’t simply ignore what Adam and Eve had done:
‘Had it been a case of a trespass only, and never of a subsequent corruption, repentance would have been well enough; but when once transgression had begun men got here under the facility of the corruption proper to their nature and were bereft of the grace which belonged to them as creatures within the Image of God. No, repentance couldn’t meet the case. What — or quite who was it that was needed for such grace and such recall as we required? Who, save the Word of God Himself, who also at first had made all things out of nothing? His part it was, and his alone, each to bring again the corruptible to incorruption and to take care of for the Father his consistency of character with all. For he alone, being Word of the Father and above all, was in consequence each capable of recreate all, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be an envoy for all with the Father.’
By the ‘Word’ of God Athanasius means God the Son, the everlasting Word through all things were made (John 1:1-3), and as he goes on to say, the Word:
‘….moved with compassion for our limitation, unable to endure that death must have the mastery, quite than that his creatures should perish and the work of his Father for us men come to nought, took to himself a body, a human body whilst our own…. He, the Mighty One, the artificer of all, himself prepared this body within the virgin as a temple for Himself, and took it for his very own, because the instrument through which he was known and through which he dwelt. Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, he surrendered his body to death as a substitute of all, and offered it to the Father.’
In these two quotations Athanasius unpacks the meaning of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 15: 46-49:
‘But it isn’t the spiritual which is first however the physical, after which the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a person of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the person of dust, so are those that are of the dust; and as is the person of heaven, so are those that are of heaven. Just as we have now borne the image of the person of dust, we will also bear the image of the person of heaven.’
In these words ‘the primary man’ is a reference to Adam and the ‘man of heaven’ is a reference to God the Son, the Word who became flesh in the best way, and for the explanation, described by Athanasius.
In addition, the ‘we’ within the last sentence refers to Christian believers. What God the Son did because of this of his incarnation made it possible for all human beings to stop to be subject to the dominion of death and develop into as a substitute individuals who possess everlasting life each now and on the planet to come back. However, there may be a condition, namely belief. As Jesus declares in John 11:25-26: ‘I’m the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.’
Furthermore, believing doesn’t just mean making an initial act of mental assent to the gospel message, it means continuing to live faithfully as a believer through the entire of our lives. ‘The one who perseveres to the top shall be saved’ (Matthew 24:13). However, we cannot live faithfully before God in this manner in our strength. We should receive God’s help, and which means we have now to ask for it because God won’t impose his assistance upon us.
The traditional words that accompany the ashes, by reminding us of our natural condition as fallen creatures, remind us of our have to ask for God’s help. And an excellent model for our asking is provided by the next words from the Prayer Book funeral service:
‘Man that’s born of a lady hath but a short while to live, and is filled with misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth because it were a shadow, and never continueth in a single stay.
‘In the midst of life we’re in death: of whom may we look for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased?
‘Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of everlasting death.
‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, thou most worthy Judge everlasting, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.’
