Ash Wednesday II: Further Backward and Further Forward (Week 28)
Readings
Genesis 2
John 20:1–20
Silent Reflection
Remarks
Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Genesis 2:7 (NIV)
While there is a necessary and sobering connection between dust and coming to grips with our own sin and mortality (as we did last week), the call to remember that we are dust and returning to dust is a call to look still further back and further ahead in time.
Dust, you see, is not inherently a bad thing or a sad thing. It wasn’t that way in the beginning. The first time we hear “dust” in the Scriptures, it’s actually not at our exile from the garden. Dust has its scriptural beginnings not in consequence, but in creation.
Before dust is a reminder of our exile from the garden, it is a reminder that we are created beings, constructed intimately by God, who stoops down into the stuff of the world, takes the dust of egg and sperm and DNA and mitosis and amniotic fluid, and breathes into it His very spirit. I imagine Him as close as my son and me when we share a pillow at bedtime—so close that my boy turns into a cyclops and we can feel the air we’re sharing from breath to breath. That’s the care God gives the dust that becomes you.
So, when in Genesis 3 God tells the man who is on the verge of being pushed out into the world to remember that he is dust, is it possible that these words are, among other things, words of comfort? We tend to hear them with a tinge of threat: “Remember you’re doomed, son.” But can we hear them another way? “Remember you are dust” can be another way of saying, “As you experience exile in a place that feels further from me, remember you are freely created by the God who is Love Itself and Goodness Itself, and so therefore you are loved.”
“Remember that you are dust” is another way of saying, “Remember your beginnings are in goodness, with purpose, and in being beloved.”
Of course that doesn’t mean we don’t screw up terribly or things don’t go horribly wrong. But I wonder if Buechner (forgive me) slightly misspoke when he said the Gospel is bad news before it’s good news. The whole truth of it and what he must have meant is that the Gospel is good news before it is bad news before it is good news.
If when I remember that I am dust, I forget that I am dust breathed upon by the Spirit of God, it can be easy to fall into a despair, and for “from dust to dust” to sound like “from sin to sin, and only ever that.” But the truth is that our experiences of fallenness and sin, while real and devastating, are neither our beginning nor our end.
“Remember that you are dust” is also an invitation to look ahead once more and see that in our breathy, dusty end is our beginning.
Here is what I mean: Jesus died. This we know and no one disputes it. He, like everyone else, followed the path described in Ecclesiastes and died, returning to dust.
The surprise twist is that, as previously stated, despite Death’s best efforts and intentions, it could not keep him. He rose. And do you know what he did then?
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark…
And in case we forgot, here again:
On the evening of that first day of the week…
Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
To be clear, we’re all going to die, but maybe, just maybe, with a resurrected Christ in the world, maybe “to dust you shall return,” at its furthest horizon, means something more now than, “One day you will die and down you’ll go and that will be all there is.”
If John’s story—at the outset of a new week of creation, in a new garden—about the re-creating breath of Jesus is any indication, maybe the dust to which we will all return will again be dust into which God will breathe His very life.
“In my end is my beginning,” T. S. Eliot wrote. Too true.
So, at its furthest end, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return” is a call to remember that your end, God willing, is as your beginning: created anew, breathed into—just as you were created and breathed into at first by a God who loves you.
In one sense, dust to dust means we move from sin to death. But outside and encircling and eventually swallowing that, it means we move from beloved creation to beloved new creation. Our beginning and our end is a matter of light and love and the breath of God. Christ is our beginning and end.
Silent Reflection
Response
Take extra time to reflect.