Ashes, Ashes, We All Fell Down

I didn’t know what to expect when I walked into my first Ash Wednesday service a few years ago. I’d grown up in a mainline denomination and then a non-denominational church, both of which raised a wary eye to anything that felt too “high church”—including the liturgical calendar. Christmas and Easter, along with their more solemn preludes on Christmas Eve and Good Friday, were the only truly sanctioned “holy days” throughout the year. Anything else felt a bit like a threat to the Reformation itself. We are modern, discerning believers after all, apparently set free from the ritualistic trappings of historic Christianity—right?

But here I was, newly attending a church that joyfully rooted itself in liturgical traditions—trying to learn them myself and pass them along to my own small children. So, with a small amount of trepidation, we entered the dimly lit sanctuary that wintry night to see what Ash Wednesday was really all about.

While foreign to me, what I witnessed during the service opened my eyes to the depths and meaning of the Lenten season. We sang hymns, heard Scriptures read, and then soberly filed down the aisle to receive an imprint of ash on our foreheads. I felt bound to my brothers and sisters in new ways—reminded of our mutual creatureliness and fallenness. I was struck by the poignancy of our church’s children, especially, wearing the dark marks of mortality across their brow. As they shifted nervously by the platform, holding tight to mom’s hand while the pastor dipped his thumb into the ash, or ran around the parking lot afterwards, oblivious to the smudgy cross they still wore, I was reminded that not even our youth can save us. We all stand in dire need of a redemption that only God can bring.

Whether we attend a formal church service or quietly note the date on our home calendar, Ash Wednesday can stamp a powerful imprint of truth not just on our foreheads but on our hearts. It’s worth paying attention to because it replays the gospel story for us in vivid detail: from dust to death to deliverance.

Dust

A common liturgy spoken in Ash Wednesday services is “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The first part of this phrase speaks to our human origins; God fashioned Adam from the ground and filled his nostrils with breath (Gen. 2:7), and every human since owes equal debt to his creating, sustaining power. Scripture seems bent on reminding us of our dustiness: “Out of it you were taken; for you are dust” (Gen. 3:19); “All are from the dust” (Ecc. 3:20); “For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (Ps. 103:14).

Ash Wednesday, therefore, reminds us that we are lowly—born of the ground we tread under our feet. Human achievements, possessions, reputations, and follower counts may grant us a temporary sense of strength and self-sustenance as we go through life, but when we enter a still, dark room and hear the glaring words of Scripture pronounce, “You are dust,” the weight hits us afresh. We can’t earn or maintain any of what we’ve been given—even our very breath—and we take none of it with us (Ecc. 2:18-23). Ash Wednesday calls us to grapple with our creatureliness and grow in humility before God and one another.

Being reminded of our humble origins leaves no room for pride or partiality among our fellow dust-dwellers. Earthly prestige and position aside, we all come from the same source and exist by the same Almighty breath. We all stand on level ground—down in the dust—before God’s transcendent majesty. For he “sits above the circle of the earth” while we stumble along its surface, as “grasshoppers” (Isa. 40:22).

Death

This side of the fall, dust is not only our beginning but also our ending. Death has entered the human scene as the wages for our sin, and now, to dust we also return at the end of our days. This is the second part of the common Ash Wednesday liturgy, drawn straight from Genesis 3:19. Our lives cycle from ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Created lowly (but for eternal glory), the fall brings us back down to earth in crushing defeat. Unable. Unworthy. Unfit to rule and reign in God’s kingdom by any measure of strength or reasonable ability.

The curse of death brings a whole host of related sorrows and griefs to our living as well. Throughout Scripture, dust and ash are representative of these. When Mordecai learns of Haman’s plot to kill the Jews, he “tore his clothes and put on sackcloth and ashes, and went out into the midst of the city, and he cried out with a loud and bitter cry” (Es. 4:1). After Tamar is defiled by Amnon, she “put ashes on her head and tore the long robe that she wore. And she laid her hand on her head and went away, crying aloud as she went” (2 Sam. 13:19). Amidst the ruins of his life, Job “took a piece of broken pottery with which to scrape himself while he sat in the ashes” (Job 2:8). Distraught and maligned by his enemies, the psalmist cries, “I eat ashes like bread and mingle tears with my drink” (Ps. 102:9). Ash is the sign of profound loss and grief—of being consumed by fire and left with nothing recognizable.

This, friends, is our human condition—living with fallen hearts in a fallen world, without hope of redemption by anything we can offer. We are dust, doomed with the rest of our race to die and disintegrate into shame and judgment forever.

Deliverance

However, Ash Wednesday’s placement in the church calendar doesn’t leave us hopelessly pondering the realities of dust and death forever. Ash Wednesday inaugurates the season of Lent, which annually carries the Church into the next chapter of the gospel story: God, in Christ, took our dust upon himself. He inhabited a fragile, subject-to-decay human body like ours. He trod the same ground we do. And then, in the greatest miracle of all, he took our death as his own. He willingly laid himself down in the ground, absolving all of sin’s guilt and punishment so that we could one day be raised to glory.

Casting ourselves down to the ashes isn’t just a sign of intense grief and despair in Scripture; it’s also an image coupled with repentance—by which we taste the Savior’s deliverance. Daniel 9:3 says, “Then I turned my face to the Lord God, seeking him by prayer and pleas for mercy with fasting and sackcloth and ashes.” Job also “repent[ed] in dust and ashes” (Job 42:6). Jesus pronounces woes on those who don’t repent “in sackcloth and ashes” when their guilt is laid bare (Matt. 11:21). We see in all these examples that pondering our dust and death actually leads to our blessing, for “those who mourn . . . shall be comforted” (Matt. 5:4). The repentant will be restored. The dying will be delivered. In this way, the season of Lent prepares the Church for the reality of the cross and the hope of the empty tomb.

Here is good news for us ashy creatures:

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me . . . he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to grant to those who mourn in Zion—to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning” (Isa. 61:1-3).

Where once we fell to the ashes, despairing death, we now gratefully cry out from them on bended knee, in worship and gratitude for God’s gracious gift of life. We soberly examine the fallenness of humanity and the wreckage of our own lives, and then we cast ourselves upon the Lifter of our heads (Ps. 3:3).

Now, year by year, as I savor an Ash Wednesday liturgy afresh and receive the marks of Jesus’ victory—a blackened cross—on my head, my heart remembers our need for lasting deliverance and its beautiful fulfillment in Christ. He is the One who alone can raise us from ashes and set our sights on the Easter exaltation to come—now and forevermore.