A Homily for Ash Wednesday 2008
Ash Wednesday has to be the most messy day of the liturgical year, and the ashes that we receive on our foreheads are the least of the mess.
The real mess are with the people. The secretaries and priests go crazy with all the phone calls wanting to know when people can get their ashes. The past couple of years I have even gotten calls from Robert Wood Johnson Health & Fitness center wanting me to go over there to distribute ashes to the people getting a workout during their lunch break. We even have people wanting to know if they could get their ashes early; say on Monday or Tuesday. There are so many people wanting ashes that the phones ring off the hook.
It seems as if more people come to church on Ash Wednesday, which is NOT a holy day of obligation, than on Christmas and Easter the two most important holy days of obligation. As a priest I often wonder why so many people feel such a strong need to receive ashes. There are so many unfamiliar faces on Ash Wednesday, so many who come for ashes but do not even stay for the reception of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. Are they all here for the right reason? How long has it been since some of them have been to Mass or Confession? Are they faithful to the Church’s teaching? Are they in a state of grace or a state of sin?
Whether people understand the real meaning of Ash Wednesday or not, it seems that all of us acknowledge at the most gut level the fact that we belong in church on Ash Wednesday. I pray that part of the reason for this gut reaction is that deep down, we all know that we are sinners in need of forgiveness. We all know that there are times, too many in fact, when we are selfish, impatient, angry, hateful, and just not nice to the people around us. Deep down we know that we are too often ungrateful to God for all the blessings that He has given us in our lives. We know that we are not able to live the good life on our own, and we so often fail to do the good that we want to do and do the evil we do not want to do.
Hopefully this awareness that we are all sinners also brings us to a more important awareness; that through the grace of our baptism we have all been made members of the one body of Christ. Our baptism, which can never be “undone” no matter how much we sin, links each of us inextricably to Christ and to one another for ever. “The ashes on our foreheads are a reminder to ourselves and a proclamation to the world that somehow, we belong to Another. Our lives are not our own but are bound up with a greater Reality. Some are more actively aware than others that this Reality has a name: Jesus Christ” (Fr. Rich Veras, “The Experience of Being a People,” Magnificat, February 2008, Vol. 9, No. 13, p. 89).
Most of us do not like messes. Messy people often make us annoyed, yet as followers of Jesus we need to recognize that Jesus was followed by a crowd of messy people. They didn’t all come to Him for the right reasons. Many of them were not faithful to Jesus, especially when the going got tough. Yet all of them were welcomed by Jesus, who looked upon the mess of women and men, and loved them.
And on this Ash Wednesday Jesus looks on us — very messy people — with that same love and acceptance. As a people of God let us enter into the holy season of Lent by acknowledging the mess of our lives so that the mercy of Christ can renew us as His Holy People.
[I really need to give Fr. Richard Veras, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, most of the credit for this homily. Monday night, as I was working on my homily for Ash Wednesday, I got a phone call from one of my sisters concerning a serious crisis with her daughter. The rest of the night was tied up with my family. Fr. Veras and I know each other through our involvement with Communion and Liberation, so when I saw he had an article in this month’s Magnificat I read it. I thought he had a wonderful reflection for Ash Wednesday on the messiness of our lives. Given the mess in my family, it really struck home for me, so I took that theme and basically said what he said, but in more of my own words.]
