“Beware of
practicing your righteousness before others in order to be seen by them, for
then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.” (Matthew
6:1)
Lent always begins with
something uncomfortable. “Remember,” we are told, “that you are dust and to
dust you shall return.” It’s the same thing God told Adam back in Genesis 19:3
when he and his woman were expelled from Paradise.
On Ash Wednesday death
takes center stage. In his classic theology, The Cost of Discipleship,
the German Lutheran pastor and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “When Christ
calls a man, he bids him come and die.” This annual remembrance of our
mortality, the black smudge we receive on our foreheads, shaped in a cross, the
symbol of humankind’s obscene talent for cruelty and murder, the recitation of
David’s penitent Psalm, are all meant to remind us of what Bonhoeffer called
“costly grace.”
Costly grace isn’t some
reward bestowed because we’ve piled up enough godly works or avoided anything
our world might see as grossly sinful. A reliance on our own merits only leads
us to arrogance and hypocrisy. We all know that. But Bonhoeffer wanted more
than just a formulaic reliance on the doctrine that God is love and will
forgive all our shortcomings as often as we choose to exercise them. As a good
Lutheran he believed that God’s law brings death—not because we choose to
ignore the Law, but because in our frailty we can never keep it. As
Jesus teaches us in the appointed Ash Wednesday Gospel (Matthew 6: 1-6, 16-21)
our temptation to sin overtakes even our most pious actions and intentions. The
law reminds us of our hopeless, selfish weakness and forces us to look in the
mirror of our souls and see a very unflattering reflection. Our notion of
ourselves as somehow special and deserving has to die so we will come weeping
back to the arms of our savior in all our brittle neediness and fear. The
awareness of ourselves as not being who we really want to be makes us like
toddlers lost in a shopping mall, desperately crying for the secure embrace of
the parent from whom we have wandered away.
The first of Luther’s Ninety-Five
Theses reads, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he meant
for the entire life of a believer to be one of repentance.” He explained in the
Small Catechism that we are to die every day to sin and be raised again to
newness of life.[i]
If pondering our own
death leads us to ponder our life, I’d ask you to think of the turning points
in your personal journey which made you who you are today. I would be willing
to wager that there was some kind of death connected to those moments. Perhaps
it was the death of one of your parents. Sadly, at times, it’s the death of a
child or a close friend. It could be the loss of a relationship, or a job, or a
dream.
When everything we think
we are is stripped away, when, as Shakespeare said, “nothing can we call our
own but death, and that small model of the barren earth which serves as paste
and cover to our bones,” we still return to Christ. It was the death and resurrection
of Jesus which made the disciples die to the notion of who they wanted
Jesus to be and rise to live as God intended them to be.
There’s a story (perhaps
apocryphal, I don’t know) about Luther teaching his Wittenberg students about the
power of God’s grace triumphing over the demands of the Law. Supposedly, a
stunned student asked the professor, “Doctor Luther, does that mean we can do
anything we want to do?” To which Luther replied, “Yes! But what do you want
to do?”
What do you want to do? Who
do you want to be? Who does Jesus say you are? The Gospel text—even for such a
solum day as Ash Wednesday—gives us courage. Jesus says to us, “Whenever you
give alms, whenever you pray, whenever fast.” He doesn’t say, “If you give
alms, if you pray, if you fast.” He assumes we are people willing to
exercise the desire and effort of discipleship. He knows we want to die to our
old frustrations, selfishness, and guilt so we can rise every day to seek his
will through generosity and compassion, confession and forgiveness, and
renunciation of those things which curve us in on ourselves and keep us from experiencing
a relationship with God.
God’s Holy Spirit be with
us during this Lenten season, that we all may say in our hearts with Saint
Paul, “…living is Christ, and dying is gain.[ii]”
No comments:
Post a Comment