Ash Wednesday is the story of a marriage. It is the account
of an unlikely union. Humanity and the
soil are the improbable partners. The tale of these Ash Wednesday nuptials
stretches back to Genesis, chapters two through eight. The earth is the silent
but crucial character in these opening chapters. The key to each of these
stories and the key to Ash Wednesday is the dirt.
It is dirt out of which God creates Adam. He emerges from
it, is lifted by the creative hand of the Lord and is enlivened by the divine
breath. The Lord makes humanity the masters of that earth of which they are a
part. Standing upon the ground, they tread upon it as kings and lords. They
tower over the earth while still attached to it. They relate to the dirt as a
husband, as the one who plants seed, as the one who gives work and care and
waits for the soil to give birth, to respond with the fruits that keeps
humanity alive. It is a curious balance, this dance of fertility which the Lord
establishes. On the one hand Adam and Eve are exalted, distinct, reaching toward
the heavens, bearing the image of the Lord who made them. Yet they are still made
of dirt and attached to it. They must stoop to it for sustenance, even in that
pristine paradise. They must push seeds into the dark and tend and water and
love the ground so that it may be become pregnant and fruitful and bear food
for them. The two, made of the same stuff, must be one, united in the bountiful
union of seed and fruit and harvest.
Sin warps this strange and wonderful mixture of betrothal
and mastery. Adam and Eve sin but it is the earth that is cursed. “Cursed is
the ground because of you.” Adam and the earth are one flesh and the dirt, the
flesh of Adam, receives the divine word of judgment. Thorns and thistles
replace the garden. The earth is transformed from humanity’s wife to humanity’s
enemy. Sin demolishes the beautiful joining of opposites. Adam, man of mud, who
stood high above the earth yet was tied to it in a relationship of planting and
giving birth, now knows that the earth will devour him. Not only seed will be
thrust into the earth, human beings themselves will be planted. The sentence is
pronounced: humanity will return to the dust. Mother earth will greedily
consume her spouse. The dirt becomes master. The balance is lost. The vertical
blessing bestowed by God to Adam is transformed into a horizontal return. The
marriage bed of the soil where Adam thrust his seed, the womb of the earth,
becomes the death bed, the tomb.
The story of the two brothers that follows the story of the
fall also pushes the ground to the forefront. The unspoken subject of the
narrative is the marriage of humanity and the earth, still intact but twisted,
an angry sullen romance. Cain is a farmer, one who embraced the soil for his
livelihood. God snubs his his offspring, his harvest. Cain, toiling in the sin
cursed ground, gives to the Lord what his seed has produced and the Lord turns
his face away. So Cain returns to that ground and plants a horrifying,
different kind of seed. He spills upon the earth the blood of his brother. It
is from the ground, recipient of Cain’s violence, that the blood cries out.
Though Cain has struck Abel, the ground is also a victim. The ground is now filled, not with seed, not
even with the drops of toiling sweat which fallen humanity must shed to get food,
but with the warm stuff of life, discharged in murderous hate. God punishes
Cain by divorcing him from that very ground from which he was made, of which he
was still a part, from which he had labored to gain nourishment. Cain, married
to the earth as one who planted seed and tended crops and received its fertile
response, must now wander on the earth and never be joined to it as husband and
giver.
The story of humanity’s conjugal connection to the dirt continues
in the account of the flood. People become so evil that God repents of ever
making them. And while his anger is focused on those he made in His own image,
that anger once more is unleashed upon the ground from which they came and to
which they are still joined. God strikes man by striking the earth with the waters
of death. To destroy mankind God must wipe clean the earth itself. Mankind and
the soil are one flesh. It is the earth which must accept the judgment of God
for man’s sin. The two partners go down together, drowning in waters of the
Lord’s wrath.
This narrative of the union of man and the earth is played
out liturgically on Ash Wednesday. It is a quick, repetitive moment of ritual: ashes, the motion of a cross,
and a few words. Yet by it, we are placed directly into the foundational
narrative of humanity. This imposition of ashes is not pedagogical. On the
first day of Lent, we are not “told” about creation or taught the doctrinal
import of the fall or the story of Cain. In fact, the appointed readings for
the day ignore the opening chapters of the Jewish Bible. What Ash Wednesday
does is place us in the story. We become actors in the narrative. The story
happens to us in a visceral, tactile way.
At that moment, all our modern pretensions are cast off. We
lose our pretend advancement and our clean, digital disconnection from things
dirty and primeval. We are thrust once more to the soil. We do not sit in the pew
learning ancient Palestinian stories. We are physically marked with ashes. Words
are spoken over our bodies. We are addressed personally and individually. We
become Adam and Eve and Cain and the recipients of the flood and what is true about
us, about our bodies, our relationship to our maker, is tossed out into the
open.
In those few seconds we live out the primordial series of
events that defines us even now. We remember our creation from the dirt, that
our bodies are real and tangible and we remember with it that the Lord breathed
His Spirit into us and that we are formed by his hand. Even more we remember
the awful mortality that comes. We will return to the dust. We die. We sin. We
are Adam and Eve. We are married to the earth. We cannot escape the ground upon
which we walk. That earth gives birth to us, we plant our seed in her, are fed
by her. And she will greedily consume our flesh someday soon. No matter how far
we have supposedly progressed, we are dirt.
With the mark on our foreheads, we stand in the place of
Cain. The ground cries out on account of the evil we have done. The blood of
our brothers and sisters cries out for vengeance. We all murder Abel, we all
have spilled his blood on the ground through neglect, hatred, envy. We rage and
fulminate in our hearts. And it by it,
we are divorced from creation. We live out the sentence of Cain. Not rooted in
one spot, we wander aimlessly, unable to connect to one another, unable to find
God in that which he has made. We are forever on pilgrimage and we never
arrive.
The last piece of Old Testament story that Ash Wednesdays
thrusts us into as participants is the most drastic: the flood. There is, of
course, no water in the Ash Wednesday ceremony just muddy splotches on wrinkled
foreheads. But the flood is there in all its destructive and saving fury. It
appears in the shape of that protective Cainite mark placed upon us: a cross.
It is here where we stand on the earth and feel the awful deluge of God’s anger
over our disobedience, that the imagination of our hearts is only evil all the
time. On Ash Wednesday we stand on the earth that God thrashed and pummeled
with water: it is the same earth that the cross of Jesus Christ was planted in.
The ground from which Adam was formed, the ground which was cursed by sin, the
ground which drank the blood of Cain’s brother, the ground which soaked up the
furious deluge is now the ground that bears the weight of the Son of God, is
splashed with his divine blood and waits to receive his lifeless body.
On Ash Wednesday we are marked with that cross, and it is a
cross of baptism. That we are marked with the cross of Christ in our baptism
and that we are so marked on the day of ashes and death and sin and shame is no
accident. For that cruciform sign of death and the words of burial that
accompany it are only washed away by the waters of baptism which is in turn nothing
else than the cross of Christ. We are baptized into his death. With the
baptismal floodwaters we go down into that earth with Christ. The waters bury
us in the ground with Him. It is there finally that death loses its grip on us.
Christ is the seed planted in the earth that the greedy grave cannot digest. Christ
is planted as seed and the earth must do what God intended it to do before the
fall, before the curse, before Abel’s blood stained it. It must give birth to
life. It must feed Gods children. It must give birth to the tree of life, with
healing fruit for humanity.
In this Ash Wednesday moment, balance is again restored
between humanity and the earth from which we spring. Creation and fall and
burial and murder and wrath are wrapped in that sign of our baptism. The burial
and resurrection of Christ become the restoration of the connection between the
earth and humanity. It marks the soil’s return into the scheme of God’s giving to
humanity. The earth once more serves humanity as mother, as giver of life as it
disgorges Christ. As Mary did at his birth, the earth gives birth to Christ and
hands him over to us. Ash Wednesday marks the reconciliation of creation and
humanity. In the death and resurrection of Christ, in our baptism, once more we
are bound together in fruitfulness to the earth receiving her harvest for our
life.
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