Marked - on Ash Wednesday
Marked
by Bernard Tam
Today, across the globe, Christians from around the world join together to celebrate this unique Holy Day known as Ash Wednesday. In the liturgical calendar, this day marks the beginning of the Lenten season (usually preceding with Shrove Tuesday - which many only remember as Pancake Tuesday - maybe for another post for another day). Growing up Catholic, this was both a significant and strange day of remembrance. I remember during my elementary and high school days not super enthusiastically embracing having the priest mark my forehead with ashes. In those younger years, I wondered how my neighbours would see me with this strange mark on my forehead. What would people think of me? As a radical? What kind of religious beliefs is this?
Fast forward 20+ years later I think I have grown with a little more maturity in my faith and a little more attunement to traditions. It is in this new consciousness that I realize how much I missed participating in this significant Holy Day. In recent years, I have felt this deep longing to once again sit in on Ash Wednesday services. In a recent pre-pandemic Ash Wednesday service, I recall driving across town to join in on the service. As I sat in the pews, the liturgy became overwhelming; the scent, the imagery and the richness of the solemnity. When the priest marked the sign of the cross with the ashes I know now that this is not just an external mark but represents something deeper.
The Ashes are significant and important; they are symbols of mourning, repentance and confession. In some churches, the ashes were made from the palm branches from prior Palm Sunday celebrations. This is quite symbolic for the anticipation of the Holy Week that is to come. Particularly in the Catholic tradition, there would be a simple solemn service that invites people into a space of repentance and mourning. The ashes (sometimes mixed with olive oil) is placed in the sign of a cross on parishioners' forehead. There would also be the utterance of “remember, man you are dust and to dust you shall return,” or “turn away from sin and be faithful to the gospel.” The parishioners would be marked for the rest of the day until they rub off the marks because of their itchy forehead or take a shower.
Marked, is such a strange conundrum of what people are experiencing. There is a kind of demarcation that differentiates us from others. I wonder if Christians recognize that we are marked people; marked by the movement of the Spirit, marked under the Lordship of Christ or marked with the hope-ward Kingdom. Being marked revealed this intimate access (almost an overhaul) into the life of the person in Jesus. This mark is not just a cover up but actually formed from the inside out.
I remember years ago I was attending a church called Freedomize in Toronto. Todd Cantelon (the lead pastor) was preaching one particular Sunday and he used a unique analogy speaking about playing a game called “spot the Christian.” While sitting at the park bench, he would look around to spot the Christian. That sat with me for quite a long time because I had wondered, do Christian look different? Sound different? Offer a different narrative in the world? Or are we the same as the world?
In today’s lectionary reading we find Isaiah 58:1-12, the prophet Isaiah speaks into the culture of His days in how they have practiced fasting. Verses 3b-4 states:
“Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please
and exploit all your workers.
Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
and in striking each other with wicked fists.
You cannot fast as you do today
and expect your voice to be heard on high.”
What is the approach to fasting? One that does not quiver in the ways how people engage and approach the injustice in the situations around them. What if we are marked but seemingly with empty words and exterior coverups.
I used to have a t-shirt that says Christian T-Shirt on it and often people would ask what else the shirt says. And I would explain “nothing else.” But I wonder if our faith is often just marked by something as thin as a Christian t-shift, where the substance does not permeate through? When we look closer we find, nothing else.
Isaiah continues:
“Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
only a day for people to humble themselves?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the Lord?
“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?”
It seems that the prophetic words challenge the external façade of a life changed but instead a life that is actually transformed and convicted that is porous into our everyday life. That is what I believe as Christ-followers our lives must mimic; not just the wearing of a Christian T-Shirt but instead marked with the narrative of Jesus.
This Ash Wednesday we may not be able to participate in the ceremony of ashes in person (at least in some regions of Canada). But perhaps this bids us an opportunity to pause and meditate. To either put on symbolic sack clothes and ashes that postures us to reflect on the marks of Christ that paint us. To be humbled by the cost of hope in Christ, to be moved by the fragility of life, to be challenged by His invitation to participate in bearing hope to our painful world. I leave with this poem by Jan Richardson as a prayer of blessing over this sacred and holy day.
Blessing for Ash Wednesday
“So let the ashes come
as beginning
and not as end;
the first sign
but not the final.
Let them rest upon you
as invocation and invitation,
and let them take you
the way that ashes know
to go.
May they mark you
with the memory of fire
and of the life
that came before the burning:
the life that rises and returns
and finds its way again.
See what shimmers
amid their darkness,
what endures
within their dust.
See how they draw us
toward the mystery
that will consume
but not destroy,
that will blossom
from the blazing,
that will scorch us
with its joy.”
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