“Man, Christianity is metal as f—!” I won’t finish that sentence here, but you get the gist. I laughed out loud when I got that text from my friend Jay. He meant it as a compliment. Jay didn’t grow up religious at all; so I was explaining Lent and Ash Wednesday to him and telling him about the reminder of our own sins and mortality that we gather today to mark our foreheads with. And he was a fan.
People have a lot of different responses to the themes of sin and death that the Church invites us to meditate on today. For some people, like Jay, Ash Wednesday feels ‘metal’—awesome in a gritty, countercultural way. But for a lot of others, the themes of today’s liturgy are a bit…morbid and morose. “Ash Wednesday’s kind of a bummer,” another friend has said to me.
And that’s fair. I don’t think most lists of Top 10 Valentine’s Day Date Ideas would include “Remember that you’re gonna die!” or “Think about how you’ve fallen short of how God wants you to live!” But I’ve gotta confess, I actually kind of like the doom and gloom. It’s not just because I never got to express my Goth phase as a teenager. I like it because the gloom and sorrow of penitence—the remembrance of our mortality and our brokenness—when we view it properly, in the context of the whole of the Gospel, it disarms the culture of guilt and shame that holds so many of us captive in our day-to-day lives.
The world around us tends to see penitence in one of two ways. Penitence is either a hypocritical performance, as we try to impress others and make ourselves feel holy; or it’s a masochistic display of self-hatred, as we grovel before an angry God, trying to win his favor and avert his wrath. Many of the displays of penitence we see, even within the Church (especially within the Church), fall into one or both of these categories. But those aren’t the kinds of penitence that we’re invited to embrace today on Ash Wednesday, in the season of Lent, or in the Christian life in general.
Christian penitence—the kind of penitence that fills the season of Lent—is what Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann calls a “bright sadness.” There is a certain gloom—a sorrow that comes with facing and naming the death and brokenness caused by sin in our lives. But it is a shadow that is illumined from the inside by the divine light which we witnessed in the Transfiguration on Sunday and which we will witness again in the Resurrection on Easter.
True Christian penitence is not groveling or posturing. It’s penitence with a purpose—penitence for the sake of transformation. We confess our sins and remember our deaths, because we know that Christ has already inhabited the deepest depths of death and brokenness, and that he has transformed it through his death and resurrection. Christian penitence—especially in this season of Lent—isn’t just about beating our breasts and bewailing our sins. It’s about naming the brokenness of the world and choosing to inhabit that brokenness together with Christ as he makes the whole world new.
In our penitence, we work together with Christ, offering up the “true fast” that Isaiah talks about: breaking every yoke and letting the oppressed go free. We are transformed by true penitence—as individuals and as a Body—gradually reshaped into the likeness of Christ, the righteousness of God. Penitence is how we participate in the paradox of Christ that redeems sin, conquers death, and makes all things new. In confessing our sins and remembering our mortality, we humble ourselves like Jesus humbled himself and embrace a bright sadness that reveals, not just our shortcomings, but God’s transforming grace already at work in the world.
Our liturgy today and the practices of Lent are concrete ways we express our penitence and participate in this saving work of Christ in the world. Jesus humbled himself to wear a crown of thorns, and so we wear a sign of his cross on our foreheads. Jesus relinquished his power to free the powerless, and so we embrace our fast to share in that work. Jesus gave his flesh and blood to satisfy the world’s hunger, and so we give our alms to feed those around us. Jesus sacrificed his own life as the most perfect prayer possible, and so we offer up our prayers to God together with his.
We join Jesus in the sorrow and pain that he embraced for the sake of the world, acknowledging our part in it, but declaring to the world that even as we embrace and name our brokenness to God, Christ is already transforming it in and through us. All of the disciplines of true Christian penitence—including this 40-day pilgrimage of Lent we start today are aids to help us focus and deepen this bright sadness—this awareness of the gap between where we are and where we should be; where we are and where we WILL be.
So remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. Because out of dust you were made and are constantly being remade along with the rest of God’s beloved Creation. This is the truth that makes Christianity so ‘metal.’ And when we remember and live into it then we will see the bright sadness at the heart of our penitence, and the darkness and gloom of this season of Lent will be as luminous to us as the bright noonday sun.