“Remember that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.” With these words, ashes are marked on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday, one of the Church Year’s two principal Fasting Days (the other being Good Friday). The ashes serve as outward signs of our repentance and our commitment to keeping a good Lent, marked by acts of penitence and self-denial; of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
“Remember that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.” These words hark back to God’s words to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in the third chapter of Genesis. There, after the serpent successfully tempts Adam and Eve to disobey God and eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree, God pronounces three curses: first upon the serpent, then upon the earth, and finally upon the first parents themselves.
To Adam in particular, God declares: “Because you have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it’ … cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life … In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground; for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
We don’t need to read the Genesis creation story literally to appreciate its profound theological truth. Somehow, something has gone terribly wrong with us and with our world. War in Ukraine, earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, catastrophic weather resulting from human-induced global warming.
None of this is God’s fault. God didn’t intend his creation to be this way. But human disobedience and rebellion have brought all this about. We’ve been cast out of paradise and have incurred a death sentence: “you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
On Ash Wednesday, the priest has the unenviable duty of re-pronouncing this ancient curse on the faithful who come forward to receive their ashes. The traditional formula is actually, “Remember, O man, that dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return.” Here, the word “man” really means “human being,” and signifies our common descent from Adam, to whom these words were first spoken. In the original Hebrew, moreover, the name Adam is derived from adamah, which means “ground” or “earth,” reminding us that in the beginning God formed the first man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, so that he became a living being.
The crucial point is that Adam’s death is not part of a natural cycle but rather the consequence of his rebellion and fall; the words accompanying the imposition of ashes mean not merely, “You’re going to die,” but, more specifically, “You’re going to die because of your sin”—the sin, that is, in which we all share as members of a fallen human race living in a fallen world.
So, the first point to get clear about our ashen crosses is that they’re markers not only of fasting and repentance, but also of sin and guilt, of mortality and death. Now, if that were the end of the story, we could only despair. It’s not the end of the story, of course, but our first need is to recognize the truth of our situation so that we can dispose ourselves to receive God’s forgiveness, grace, and healing. And that really is the point of today’s liturgy: to accept in all humility the truth of who we are apart from God. The word “humility” derives from the Latin humus, earth. We’re from the earth, condemned to return to the dust whence we came.
These first words of our Lenten journey are, however, by no means the last. In fifteenth chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul writes explicitly of the contrast between the first Adam and the second Adam, that is, Jesus Christ: “The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.”
It’s a remarkable passage. “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.” In a few minutes, we shall receive a cross of ash upon our foreheads, signifying our membership in Adam, the man of dust. But at our baptism we received another cross on our foreheads, not of ashes but of the oil of chrism, and the words then spoken were: “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever.” The cross of chrismation thus signifies our membership in Christ, the man from heaven.
So, these two signings of the cross point to our two identities: who we are in Adam, and who we are in Christ. On one hand: “Thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” On the other hand: “Thou art sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever.” Our baptism carries the promise that even after we return to the dust, after the pattern of Adam, so there awaits us the glory of resurrection and eternal life, after the pattern of Christ.
Today, on Ash Wednesday, we acknowledge our old identity in Adam, the man of dust. But in forty days’ time we shall conclude this season of Lent at the Great Vigil of Easter by blessing the waters and renewing our baptismal vows in celebration of the Lord’s Resurrection. In between, the Church invites us to undertake a journey of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving to reclaim and live into our new identity in Christ, the man from heaven. God has given us the desire to be here now at the starting point; pray that he will likewise grant us the grace of perseverance to finish the course that we begin today.
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