6 February, AD 2008
The first day of Lent,
commonly called Ash Wednesday
“The Trumpet and the Silence”
INFSHG+
But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face; that thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret: and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly. (St. Matthew 6:17-18)
When we hear today’s proper reading for the epistle and proper gospel read, one after the other, we cannot help but marvel at how at odds they appear to be.
The prophet Joel tells the people of Israel that they need to weep with all their heart. He tells them that the time is short, they do not know whether they are going to see one more sunrise, so go out now, sound the alarm and have everyone gather. Begin the fast, call everyone together, he says, and publicly announce our sorrow for our sins to the world. Go so far, he says, as to have the priests themselves come out of the Temple and cry out to God, “Spare thy people, O Lord, and give not thine heritage to reproach.”
Then we read our Lord’s own words, as St. Matthew has recorded them. He tells us that we should indeed fast, but that fasting is not something we should do in public. Only hypocrites make a public show of denying themselves. We should not show our self-denial to the world, but keep it to ourselves. If we feel faint, then we should wash our faces. Far from throwing ashes on our head, we should anoint ourselves.
These two pictures do not look like they go together very well. How can they be the message of the One God, in whom is no shadow of turning? How can we blow the trumpet to proclaim the fast and yet fast in secret? How can the priests call out to God on behalf of the people and yet also mourn in secret?
The answer is that we should do both. We should do as we do today: proclaim that Lent has begun and that we have commenced our fast. We are going about our path of repentance and we will solemnly gather day by day. The priest has come to the porch and he has called out to God to spare His people. We each have come forward as well, to have the ashes applied to mark that we set out on the Lenten journey. That is the word of God as Joel conveyed it to us. We tell the world once again that we Christians recognize sin, and that it is utterly apart from grace. We announce that once again, we will stand aside from the world, mourn that sin so prevails and pray that grace may abound.
But then the service tonight will end and we will disperse and from that moment on, we obey our Lord’s word. We will go home and wash the ashes from our foreheads. We will wash up tomorrow and go about our business as if nothing were changed. To the wide world, we won’t look like mourners. We won’t look like people fasting and abstaining. We will be silent and the world will quickly forget there is anything to wonder about, except among ourselves. Among ourselves, the task is to maintain the fast and to remember what we have done, what we have not done and what we should have done. We will mourn for what we have done wrong and silently meditate about how we could have done better. But we will not announce that to the world. We will mourn for sin in secret because that is what God has commanded. Remember that our Lord’s command is not a novelty: Joel heard the command, too. Even as we fast and weep and mourn, we are to rend our hearts, not our garments. We are not to show our repentance to the uncaring world, but to seek deeply into our souls, to find every scrap of sinfulness. And when we find that sin, we are not to cry out, but to turn and offer that sin to Christ, and we are to ask Him to cleanse us from that sin. When we do that, we have hearts that are full of Christ. We have hearts that grow to be like Him because He fills them and nourishes them. We become a little more like Him, and we move a step closer to Him with every sin we find and ask Him to take away.
So it is no contradiction to call the fast publicly but then fast silently. It is the right order of things. The world needs to at least hear that repentance is necessary and that the time to repent has come. But that may be the end of it for the wider world. For us, we have much more to do. We have treasures to lay up no one can see or touch and that work cannot be done out in the world. It must be done secretly, in our hearts, where Jesus Christ works, silently. Now that the trumpet has blown and the fast has been called, let us go outwardly quiet and for the next 40 days, ask God every day to come into our hearts, make them new and prepare them as His own against the day He comes again in glory to call us physically to be with Him forever in paradise.
+And now, unto God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost be ascribed all might and majesty, power, dominion and glory, both on this day and every day, world without end. Amen.