By David Gushee
Last Wednesday, I attended my first Ash Wednesday Mass since…. Well, actually, though I grew up Catholic, I have no memory of ever having attended an Ash Wednesday service.
While these days I feel more happily Baptist than at any time since the naïve days of 1978, when I was a new Baptist convert and had never heard of “Baptist Battles,” I have also found myself hungry to reconnect with the piety of my Catholic childhood. Maybe I am finally in the process of weaving together the elements of both Christian traditions into my life, rather than viewing my Catholic childhood as entirely left behind.
This is the background to my decision to join with my wife, Jeanie, in actually doing Lent in the classic fashion this year. It helps that our pastor is leading our church through the seven last words of Christ in the series of messages leading up to Easter. Meanwhile, my Bible study class is reading through the last chapters of Luke. At First Baptist Church of Decatur, Ga., this is for us a Lenten season with intentional focus on the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ.
But there’s more. This Lent Jeanie and I both made a vow to live without sweets or desserts of any kind. We are also fasting from meat on Fridays. These are vows, not hopes, wishes or guidelines. Maybe such vows are not important. Maybe they are really important.
What attracts me to serious Lenten observance and to these vows this year? I think it’s a culmination of a number of things.
Jesus is my model and my Lord. He left heaven’s glory and came to earth in the form of a servant. He daily laid aside whatever he personally might have desired to pursue the Father’s calling on his life.
He set his face toward Jerusalem, knowing that betrayal, suffering and death awaited him there. His ability to follow his calling even unto death was the product of a lifetime of disciplined preparation. He learned how to do what he was called to do. We see a significant moment in that learning process in the temptation account. But surely that was not the only occasion.
So I fast from my much-beloved sweets and Friday meat because I want to be more like him in his embodied discipline. I want to develop the habit of faithfulness in this small matter that perhaps I might learn how to be more faithful in larger matters.
Christ’s path to the Cross makes me think of the kind of world it must be, that the suffering and death of Jesus would be the only sufficient means of its redemption. Ours is a Cross-shaped faith because we live in a Cross-shaped world. A sinful, suffering, broken world requires a suffering, broken Savior whose love alone is sufficient to bear its sin. And so the headlines from Libya and Japan are all too fitting in this season. The strafed and the bombed, the drowned and the irradiated of our world … a crucified God makes sense in a world like this.
The Ash Wednesday Mass that we attended emphasized repentance. But this was not a morbid self-flagellation session. The focus was repentance-unto-recommitment. When the cross-shaped ashes were inscribed on our foreheads, the celebrant said, “Repent, and live the gospel.”
Lent in the Christian tradition is a season of self-examination, a kind of inward turning, not for its own sake, but for the sake of a deeper and truer life of discipleship. God knows that there is enough sin in my life that six weeks of deeper self-examination is timely in any season. When I felt those ashes on my forehead, I thought: “Christ died for me, dying sinner that I am. These ashes feel right.”
The priest told us that Lent is a season of witness to our faith. That is one reason why the tradition forbids washing off the ashes until the end of the day. Jeanie and I went out for dinner and a bookstore trip after church and were, inevitably, asked about what the ashes meant. It reminded me that most Christians, most of the time, wear no visible sign of their identity in Christ — unlike people of most other major world religions.
One of the most common refrains of Protestant religion is something like this: “Christ did it all for you. There’s nothing you can do to earn his favor. Accept his forgiving grace.” Even today, it seems we still fear “works-righteousness,” that scourge of five centuries ago, more than anything else.
It may just be me, but I like this experience of one season of the year in which I believe that following Christ requires something concrete and bodily from me, toward God. Maybe this is more the need of our era than ancient worries about works-righteousness. It is my need, anyway.