From Palms to Ashes

Why ashes on this day which inaugurates the church’s season of Lent? The burning of the palms is an ancient practice, emerging as part of the liturgy for Ash Wednesday in the early Middle Ages. The palms we use are from last year’s celebration of Palm Sunday, when the church remembers Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem. We take them, now dry and brittle, remembering how green they were in the processions on that joyous day full of children’s laughter and parades down the center aisle. Yet even then, they carried a word of anticipation, looking ahead to Jesus’ last journey of life when crowds gathered to cheer his arrival, the same crowds who within days would sanction his execution. They heralded his coming as the hope of the nation, the fulfillment of their messianic hopes, shouting: “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the heavens!” And they were, like us, people of manifestly good if also fickle intentions. So much is different across the ages, and yet so much remains the same.

We take these palms to remember the beauty and resilience, the fragility and fallibility, of our strivings and intentions. We see in them both the sincerity and the insufficiency of our piety and actions. We recognize in them the courage we once had and lost; the noble desires we set aside in yielding to lesser ambitions; the commitments we allowed to dissipate through fear and doubt and negligence. We take them as symbols of human frailty, our frailty. We see in them reminders of our failing to herald God’s reign of peace and justice for all. In their burning, we confess that we have not loved ourselves, or others, or God, with all our heart and mind and strength. We confess that we have often lived badly and loved poorly, that too often we have turned from others and clung to our own ambition and privilege.

We burn them, as Christians have done for centuries before us, as a tangible offering of our hope for conversion of life. These ashes are a sign for us to remember that these failings are not a final ending, but rather a place to begin anew. They invite us to join ourselves to the demanding work of love in this world. They call us into communities shaped by justice - to resist war, to oppose prejudice, to stand against the evil powers of this world. They awaken our desire to live, as Jesus lived, for the full human dignity and rights of those who are the least in this world – the oppressed and marginalized and outcast. They encourage us to follow in Jesus’ way by living lives shaped not by judgment and inertia but by mercy and compassion.
We bring ourselves to be marked by these ashes in the shape of a cross upon our foreheads, not as a testimony about ourselves or to boast of our piety, but as a mark of God’s strength among us and within us, in the presence of Jesus. We join our lives to his through our desire to know and follow in his way, to become his body in this world that God so loves. Even the ashes of our lives are able to bear this desire. They remind us that we come from God and from the dust, and that we go to God and to the dust – dust that awakens our thirst, dust blessed with the memory of journey; dust that cradles seeds of hope. Dust touched with Jesus’ despair, and ours; with our hope, and his. Dust that whispers good news to the brokenhearted; peace to the anguished; joy to the sorrowing.

In these flames may we remember the fire of Jesus’ love which death could not extinguish, and see in them the love of every prophet, the justice borne by every witness to God’s truth, the peace that rises from every act of compassion and justice – each and all as forms of God’s whole presence in our broken world.

Dr. Mark S. Burrows, Professor of the History of Christianity