Ash Wednesday 2004 |
O blessed day! At a time when we are tempted to act out perpetual Carnival with no ensuing Lent, here is the beginning of the sad but beautiful springtime of the Church’s year, inspiring us to rediscover the rhythms which are integral to a spiritually attuned life.
The submerging of the rhythms of the day, the week and the year which connect us to the other parts of the creation, to the sun and the moon and the seasons, by a hectic tide of getting and spending leaves us dangerously exposed to spiritual exhaustion. Paradoxically as each moment is hyped in a life which lacks light and shade, feast and fast as part of a coherent pattern embracing the whole year, then everything is reduced to a dull average. In this state we are vulnerable to the dejection which swept over Hamlet when he exclaimed, “how stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the usages of this world”.
Ash Wednesday invites us to resist the pressure of the passing moment, to acknowledge those parts of our life which have became stale and to open ourselves to the gift which Christ longs to impart, newness of life, the gift of the Easter or Resurrection life.
The gospel helps us to see how we should go about our work. This passage from St John does not appear in the very earliest manuscripts and in the Greek versions of the New Testament it was not finally accepted in the standard text until about 900 AD. The story seems, however, to be ancient and consistent with the teaching of Jesus but perhaps the early church was disconcerted by the ease with which Jesus forgave the woman caught in adultery at a time when the church’s own penitential discipline was very stern.
Jesus comes into the Temple very early in the morning. It might be here in St Paul’s. The people come to him and then the religious professionals, the arty of the pious enter, we can imagine with a great surge of indignation. A woman had been caught in adultery. [It is important to remember that in the religious Law of the time, adultery was unfaithfulness on the part of a married woman. The Law was not concerned with affairs between husbands and unmarried women.]
The woman had been taken “in the very act”. She should be stoned. Moses says so in the Law. What do you say? It is trap of course to show Jesus up as someone with no respect for the Law of Moses. You can feel the indignation, the cunning, the fury. Standards slipping everywhere and this so called teacher undermining the traditions of the faith.
What does Jesus do? He stoops and with his finger writes upon the ground.
It is easy to get on a treadmill of over consumption, overwork, gusts of anger and diminishing awareness. There are warning signs in our irritation within, evidence that there are unacknowledged shadows we are covering up. We relieve the pressure by projecting these shadows on to other people. We do not know what we are doing but if you have ever felt a surge of dislike for someone you have only just met, hang onto to that feeling for you have been given a precious indication of what you are covering up inside yourself. We all dislike most in others what we are prone to ourselves.
Jesus detaches himself from the confrontation. He stoops rather than bristles and enters into argument. He doodles with his finger upon the earth perhaps he was acting out the saying of the Prophet Jeremiah, “Those who turn away from you shall be written upon the earth for they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living water.” [XVII,13]
The message here is not that we should opt out of confrontations which may be sometimes necessary but that if we want to see clearly and engage profoundly there are times when we must stoop and refrain. You disengage to clarify and connect at depth.
What does this mean for us? Awareness is diminished by over-stimulation. Our Lenten fasting should not be some token abstinence from sweeties but a conscious effort to reduce stimulation to stoop to clarify and connect. If we wish to emancipate ourselves from the hectic hype and pressure of the passing moment then it may be more important to refrain from switching on the Today programme first thing in the morning than renouncing chocolate. But do not neglect the reality that what we eat and drink does have a bearing on our awareness and that we often over indulge because we are unhappy and need to confront that unhappiness.
Jesus’s life was marked by a rhythm of walking and talking with the crowds and then retreating to a desert place. In Lent we stoop down and detach in order to clarify and connect more profoundly. That is why any fasting from over stimulation must be accompanied by a renewed commitment to meditation, the way in which we clarify the world within and reduce the noise so that we can hear the voice of conscience.
The babble continued, “they continued asking him” so “he lifted himself up” [we have a hint here that the journey to Easter will pass through the events of Good Friday where he will draw a new world to himself as he is lifted up upon the cross]. This lifting up, like the cross, if we contemplate it, shows us ourselves. In the gospel story he shows the crowd their inner selves. “He that is without sin among you cast the first stone.”
We may be surrounded by some really difficult and wrong headed people but there will be no spiritual progress until we can rein in our projections and see clearly our own state. Christians must give up self justification for Lent.
God longs for us to enjoy the new life which bursts from the tomb but our lives become old, a crust forms over the well spring at the heart of life where the Holy Spirit flows with inexhaustible vitality, we become mired in cynicism and shallow expectations. The Palm Crosses from last year have been burnt, here is the ash and soon we shall receive the ash on our foreheads as a sign that the natural life disconnected from the life of the Holy Trinity is bound to a cycle of decay and death, from dust to dust. Openness to the gift of Christ comes when we confront our creatureliness and see clearly that we are not immortal gods but mortal humans. Jesus draws clarity and insight from the earth to which he stoops.
Again he stoops down. He does not argue or feed the frenzy of indignation which swept in with the accused woman. Blessedly those who are given the gift to see themselves when Jesus lifts himself up can hear the truth and they in turn detach themselves and leave the scene.
Jesus is left alone with the woman where she was in the midst, accused. Again Jesus lifts himself up and asks “Did no man condemn thee?” She says “No man Lord”. Jesus says “Neither do I condemn thee; go thy way from henceforth sin no more.”
Those who think that the woman has got away with it too easily have not understood the spiritual reality of the story. The woman has not been condemned by others but is confronted with her own promise breaking and unfaithfulness. To confront the truth about oneself can be agony and physical and mental pain. How can we forgive ourselves? That is often the hardest thing to do. Jesus’s words cut like a surgeon’s scalpel. There is no condemnation, there is release from self loathing but there is no fudging – walk on and change. First the release then the transformation.
Give yourself time to be present in this scene, perhaps changing your position as you look and listen to what Jesus says and does. Be one of the original crowd, enter with the scribes, stand by the woman. This is a time for seeing clearly our evasions, the addictive ways in which we hide from the truth about ourselves, our frailty, our mortality, our meanness and worse. Detach in order to confront these realities. Hear Jesus Christ say even to you and me, I do not condemn you but walk on and accept the transformation which comes to those who turn in my direction and are filled with my spirit.
