Reliving The Passion #1 - Reliving the Passion

Luke 12:16–21

And he told them a parable, saying,

“The land of a rich man brought forth plentifully; and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns, and build larger ones; and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.’

“But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’

“So is he who lays up treasures for himself and is not rich toward God.”

Whenever the journey to Easter begins, it must always begin right here: at the contemplation of my death, in the cold conviction that I shall die.

“Remember,” the Pastor has said for centuries, always on this day. “Remember,” the Pastor has murmured, touching a finger to ash in a dish and smearing the ash on my forehead—

“Remember, thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.”

Ash Wednesday, the day of the personal ashes, the first of the forty days of Lent: Like a deep bell tolling, this word defines the day and starts the season and bids me begin my devotional journey: Memento! “Remember!”

Well! But that sounds old in a modern ear, doesn’t it? Fusty, irrelevant, and positively medieval! Why should I think about death when all the world cries “Life” and “Live”? The priests of this age urge me toward “positive thinking,” “grabbing the gusto,” “feeling good about myself.” And didn’t Jesus himself promise life in abundance? It’s annoying to find the easy flow of my full life interrupted by the morbid prophecy that it shall end. Let’s keep things in their places, simple and safe: life now, while there is life; death later, when there must be death…

Nevertheless, Memento! tolls the ageless bell. In spite of my resistance, the day and the season together warn: “Remember!” And God, in Jesus’ parable, interrupts my ease indeed with an insult. “Fool!” says God (and so long as it stays a parable, this is a caution; but when I shall hear it in fact, it has become a death knell). “Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”

Keep it simple? says the Lord. Fool, this is as simple as it gets: if you do not interrupt your life with convictions of the death to come, then neither shall your death, when it comes, be interrupted by life. “Life now, death later,” indeed! But your life will be now only, and brief. Your death will be forever.

Ancient is this warning of the church—so ancient that the modern Christian is embarrassed to find her church ignorant, contrary to the freedoms of this age. Ancient, likewise, is the season of Lent, when the Christian is encouraged to think of her death and the sin that caused it—to examine herself, to know herself so deeply and well that knowledge becomes confession. But ancient, too, is the consolation such an exercise provides, ancient precisely because it is eternal.

It is this: that when we genuinely remember the death we deserve to die, we will be moved to remember the death the Lord in fact did die—because his took the place of ours. Ah, children, we will yearn to hear the Gospel story again and again, ever seeing therein our death in his, and rejoicing that we will therefore know a rising like his as well.

Remember now that thou art dust. Death now—yes, even in the midst of a bustling life. My death and Jesus’ death, by grace conjoined. Memento!—because this death, remembered now, yields life hereafter. And that life is forever.

Ah, dear Jesus!

I feel the ashes of mortality upon my heart. Give me, please, the courage to acknowledge them; then give me the faithful sight to see them on your forehead; for you have died the death in my stead, my Redeemer and my Lord!

Amen.