Thought for Ash Wednesday: taking personal responsibility we can pass through flesh and dust

By far the biggest religious story in the news this week has been the impending resignation on 28 February of Pope Benedict XVI on grounds of failing physical and mental health. It is a story of the acceptance of personal responsibility. As John Paul II’s closest adviser, Benedict when still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had seen the previous Pope incapacitated by ill health in his last months and clearly decided that for this to happen again would be detrimental to the interests of the Catholic Church.

The news of Benedict XVI’s impending resignation came against the backdrop of another story, from the world of British domestic politics, stretching back to the year 2003. It was in that year that a candidate for election to the leadership of one our political parties persuaded his then wife to claim that she, and not he, had been driving in excess of the speed limit and therefore should receive three penalty points on her driving licence (which, if he had accepted the penalty would have resulted in his receiving a ban from driving). For ten years, the politician lied about his decision and only faced up to his responsibilities and resigned his seat in Parliament last week. The case against his former wife for perverting the course of justice continues. She claims to have been coerced by her husband into accepting the penalty points. Neither former husband – the ex-politician – nor former wife, it seems, have been prepared to accept personal responsibility for their decisions at the time.

The acceptance of personal responsibility by the Christian is our theme because it is a central concern for Lent. In our liturgy, we hear in Psalm 51 king David accepting responsibility for his actions and asking for forgiveness by God. It’s a good place to start, and much more satisfactory than Genesis 3:12, where Adam seeks to shirk his responsibility for eating the apple which had been strictly forbidden (cf. Genesis 2:17) by telling God that ‘the woman whom Thou gavest to be with me’ had passed him the forbidden fruit. ‘It wasn’t my fault, guv’, we can almost hear in Adam’s words. ‘It was the woman what led me astray.’

It is perfectly possible for the believer to hear the words of Jesus and to ignore them: Jesus’ parable of the man who builds his home on rock and the other who does so on sand is interpreted as the one who hears Jesus’ words  and acts upon them, as against the one who does not (Matthew 7:21-28). Again, the emphasis is upon the personal responsibility of the believer. ‘Repent, therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out…’ we read in Acts 3:19.

God has set the standards for which we are responsible and by which we are measured. They are explained in His law as revealed in Scripture. It tells us what is good and what God requires of us. ‘He has showed you, O man, what is good’ we read in Micah 6:8. ‘And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’ Some day all of us have to give an account for our sins of commission and omission. ‘For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad’ (2 Cor. 5:10). Chapter 20 of the Book of Revelation has a graphic image of the book of life: ‘And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done’ (Revelation 20:12). Salvation is not only based in faith but in repentance of sin. Repentance is not just asking for forgiveness, as does the penitent thief hanging on the cross next to Jesus (Luke 23:42). Repentance is forsaking sin and trusting in Jesus Christ (metanoia). We are all called to make an active choice to trust in Jesus Christ.

‘Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’ (Genesis 3:19) the priest pronounces at the imposition of the ashes of Ash Wednesday. It is intended to provide us with a sober appraisal of the context of our existence. That context is dust. Indeed, it is in our dust that we are saved.

We know that the Word became flesh like us. ‘“The flesh is the hinge of salvation” (Tertullian). We believe in God who is creator of the flesh; we believe in the Word made flesh in order to redeem the flesh; we believe in the resurrection of the flesh, the fulfilment of both the creation and the redemption of the flesh’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church, para 1015).

The Word also became dust like us. ‘Rightly understood’, Karl Rahner writes, “you are dust” ‘is a complete expression of life.’ Rahner continues: ‘When on Ash Wednesday we hear the words “remember you are dust” we are told then that we are brothers and sisters of the incarnate Lord. We are told everything that we are: nothingness that has been filled with eternity; death that teems with life; futility that redeems; dust that is God’s life forever.’

         So when we hear the words that we are dust, these are not a source of despair, but the best words we will ever hear. It is in our dust that we are saved. But it can only be thus if we accept our personal responsibilities first. We return to the words of Karl Rahner in his essay Dust You are: ‘flesh designates not only the pivot and hinge of the movement into nothingness and death, but also the pivot and hinge of a movement that passes through death’s nothingness and forlornness into life, into eternity, into God.  Ever since that moment, the sentence of terrifying judgment, “dust you are” is changed for the person of faith and love. The old sense is not abolished; the old sense must be endured and experienced in tears, in the bitterness of nothingness and death, in evil and dying, in the bitterness of limitations. But the downward motion of the believer, the descent with Christ into the dust of the earth, has become an upward motion, an ascent above the highest heavens. Christianity does not set us free from the flesh and dust, nor does it bypass flesh and dust; it goes right through flesh and dust.’

         Thus, death is not the end of our dust. The cross is our sign. It signifies what Paul proclaimed without ceasing: ‘If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through His Spirit which dwells in you’ (Romans 8:11).

Last Sunday's Thought: Baptism: the beginning of life in the Holy Spirit

The appointed readings for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity in the lectionary, which is used by most churches world-wide, happen to be particularly appropriate for a service of baptism. In the Acts of the Apostles, we learn that early Christianity was referred to as ‘the way’ (Acts 19:9, 23; 24:22). As Jesus makes clear in today’s gospel, the work of God is to believe in the person God has sent to the world: the Way, in other words, is the way of Jesus Christ. It is this way that Jesus points to in the gospel of John, when he says that he is ‘the bread of life’. Whoever comes to Jesus, he declares will never be hungry, and whoever believes in him will never be thirsty. ‘Do not work for the food that perishes’, he warns us, ‘but for the food that endures for eternal life.’

         And it is the way of Jesus Christ to which St Paul points in his letter to the young church at Ephesus. He talks about the growth from infancy to mature faith in Jesus Christ. We need the various gifts that the Church has to equip us for our journey in Christ. These enable us to ‘grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ’. A simpler translation by Tom Wright of the last verse reads thus: ‘He [that is Jesus Christ] supplies the growth that the whole body needs, linked as it is and held together by every joint which supports it, with each member doing its own proper work. Then the body builds itself up in love.’

         The Christian journey, from infancy to mature faith, assisted by parents and godparents who must ‘speak the truth in love’, is thus a journey from an insecure faith – ‘thrown this way and that on a stormy sea, blown about by every gust of teaching, by human tricksters, by their cunning and deceitful scheming’ – to a mature faith in Christ Jesus, God’s son. ‘Then we shall reach the stature of the mature Man measured by the standards of the king’s fullness’, that is the fullness of Jesus.

         There is an important textual link between our Gospel reading and St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. At John 6:27, Jesus comments: ‘Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.’ This idea of God ‘setting his seal’ – akin to a human ruler affixing his seal with hot wax on a document – also appears twice in Ephesians. In the first chapter we read ‘In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation – having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise’, or ‘the spirit of promise, the holy one’ (Ephesians 1:13). And just before the end of chapter four, from which our reading this morning comes, we read ‘Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption’, or ‘the spirit who put God’s mark on you to identify you on the day of freedom’ (Ephesians 4:30).

         In almost legal language – and today it is lawyers who are virtually the only ones who still affix wax seals on documents – we thus see a connection between God, his son Jesus Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit within us, and ourselves as believers. Jesus is the ‘person whom God the father has stamped with his seal of approval’. Those who believe in Jesus’ gospel are stamped with his seal of approval by the Holy Spirit; and finally, ‘God has stamped his seal on us, by giving us the [Holy] Spirit in our hearts as a first payment and guarantee of what is to come’ (2 Corinthians 1:22).

The Holy Spirit comes into our lives through baptism (Paul tells us that ‘we were all baptized into one body, by one spirit’: 1 Corinthians 12:13). The seal of God is the Spirit who descends upon us as individuals at baptism and takes residence inside us and confirms us as God’s children. In a legal sense we are ‘adopted’ and ‘sealed’ for God; from a relationship point of view, we become members of God’s family. The gift of eternal life begins for the believer because of the arrival of the Holy Spirit at baptism and his continuing indwelling in us, ‘his spirit who lives within you’ as Paul tells us in chapter eight of Romans (Romans 8:11). The opportunities for a Christian life for the believer are boundless as a result of our baptism. ‘Don’t you see?’, Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 3, ‘You are God’s Temple! God’s spirit lives within you!’ (1 Corinthians 3:16). It is for that exalted purpose that we all should strive, and especially for this that parents and godparents should nurture this young child to be baptized in the faith. ‘All who are led by the spirit of God… are God’s children’ (Romans 8:14). Thanks be to God.