ASH WEDNESDAY

March 5, 2025

Saints Matthew and Mark, Barrington, R. I.

 

 

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” With these words, the priest marks the congregation’s foreheads with ashes on Ash Wednesday—one of the Church’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; prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.

 

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall 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, 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 symbolic truth. Somehow, something has gone terribly wrong with us and with our world. War in Ukraine and the Middle East; catastrophic weather patterns resulting from human-induced global warming.

 

None of this is God’s fault. God didn’t intend his creation to turn out this way. But human disobedience and rebellion have brought it all about. We’ve been cast out of paradise and we’ve 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. I remember one of the priests at my seminary telling us that after we were ordained, one of our most difficult duties would be to say these words even to our own children when we marked their foreheads with the ashes.

The traditional formula is actually, “Remember, O man, that dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return.” Here, however, the word “man” really means “human being,” and signifies our common descent from Adam. 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 out of dust from the ground.

 

In the biblical understanding, moreover, Adam’s death is not part of some natural biological cycle but rather the direct consequence of his rebellion and fall. The words accompanying the imposition of ashes thus mean not merely, “You’re going to die,” but “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 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, but our primary need is to recognize the truth of our situation so that we may seek 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—so that having humility means implicitly accepting the truth that we’re from the earth, destined to return there.)

 

These first words of our Lenten journey are, however, by no means the last. In his First Letter to the Corinthians (in a reading we heard two Sundays ago), Saint Paul writes explicitly of the contrast between the first Adam and Christ, the second Adam: “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.”

In a few minutes, we shall receive a cross of ash on our foreheads. But we need to remember that at our baptism we received another cross on our foreheads, not of ashes but of the oil of chrism, marked with the words: “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever.” So, where the Lenten cross of ashes signifies our membership in Adam, the man of dust, the baptismal cross of chrism signifies our membership in Christ, the man from heaven.

 

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: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” On the other hand: “You are 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, nonetheless resurrection glory awaits us after the pattern of Christ.

 

Today, then, we acknowledge our old identity as members of Adam, the man of dust. In forty days’ time we shall conclude this season of Lent at the Great Vigil of Easter by 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 in order to reclaim and live into our new identity as members of Christ, the man from heaven. God has granted us the desire to be here at the starting point; we pray that he will likewise grant us grace to continue and finish the journey that we begin today.