It leaves us feeling more available to other people, and them to us. It generates an energy we can use to connect with other people. A freedom that we will feel before we recognize. All of those things we will have to learn to let go of as Jesus did.Īnd what we will experience with each event of letting go is a freedom. Our expectations for the opportunities for the rest of our lives. The relationships of people that have died and gone before us. Our health, our physical wellbeing, our ego, our pride, our possessions. We will have to let go of all of those parts of life that we cling to so desperately. And so our life too will need to be centered around a surrender, a giving away, a letting go. Not to watch the ministry of Jesus, but to be like Jesus. And as we look at Jesus's life, what we will see is a constant letting go, a constant surrender, a constant giving of himself.Īnd our task then as followers of Christ is not to look at that, but to become that. And though part of us will die, there is another part that can experience eternal life. For we are dust and to dust we shall return. We are all going to stand where Jesus stood. We'll have to understand death through the lenses of Jesus's life.īecause you see, we are all condemned to death. Yet if we are to understand the meaning of Christ's death, and in fact, what follows the Resurrection and the Ascension, we'll have to see more than those symbols of our own fear and anxiety. That physical and psychological pain can be all that we see. They just hung him on the cross and left him there." And when we came and collected him and got him finally to the hospital and he came to, the doctor looked him and said, "What happened?" His response was this. There was a youth sitting right over there who immediately after the reading fainted, his head hit the pew right in front of him. I remember a reading of the passion narrative right here in this space. It stimulates our fear and anxiety until that suffering is all that we can consider.
Instead, we are left with the fear and anxiety of death, and that can be problematic when we come to Holy Week, when we come to the passion gospel where the physical and psychological torture that Jesus experiences causes us to step back all the more. It's not as if life allows us to climb up to the top of a tower, overlooking the boundary between this world and the next so that we can see what will happen and be comfortable. We have a high anxiety about what death might be like and what happens after death, and we're afraid of it and would prefer not to think about it. Usually I just breathe deeply and move on to the next person.īut there's something about that moment, which is worth pausing and considering, because I think we just generally fear death.
Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.
REMEMBER THAT YOU ARE DUST AND TO DUST YOU SHALL RETURN FULL
Invariably, I come upon a young child or a youth who looks up at me with bright eyes, so full of life, so much ahead of them. And every Ash Wednesday, I have the same experience as we go through our liturgy imposing ashes on the foreheads of those who have gathered in prayer. We heard these words on Ash Wednesday when ashes were imposed on our foreheads, looking forward to this week, to the death of Jesus.
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