Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent, which many Christians observe with fasting, repentance, worship, and prayer in preparation for Easter.  As Jesus spent forty days of testing and temptation in the wilderness before he began his public ministry, so the Lenten season spans forty self-reflective days.

It is a season of remembrance.  “Remember you are dust and unto dust you shall return.”  These are the words that are uttered in congregations worldwide, as they have for nearly 1500 years.  The congregants’ foreheads are darkened with ashes, reminding each one of their frail humanness, and also of their Creator, for the sign signifies God’s words in Genesis 3:19: “For dust you are and to dust you will return.”

Though there is no mention of Ash Wednesday in the Scriptures, there are many occasions of repentance and mourning linked not only with sackcloth, but also with ashes.  The first mention of ashes occurs in Genesis 18 when Abraham pleads to God on behalf of his family and the people of Sodom: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty?  Will you destroy the whole city because of five people?” Abraham recognizes who he is—a frail and sinful creature—but boldly appeals to his Creator’s mercy.

We read of ashes associated with priestly practices in Leviticus and Numbers, but strikingly, the first instance of someone putting ashes on their forehead is found in the tragic story of Tamar’s rape by her half-brother.  “Tamar put ashes on her head and tore the ornamented robe she was wearing.  She put her hand on her head and went away, weeping aloud as she went” (2 Samuel 13:19).  Her own brother tries to persuade her to keep quiet and to minimize the enormity of her loss, saying, “Don’t take this thing to heart” (v. 20).  Surely, being the children of King David, something could be arranged, for David had the power and resources to keep this quiet.

Yet Tamar publicly mourns her anguish and the consequences of another’s sin, testifying to its horror in the sight of God.  In doing so she also bears an enormous cost by marking herself as a defiled woman in that culture.

Similarly, the ashes upon Christian foreheads are in the form of a cross, reminding each one of our own death’s and of the death on the Cross.  As the catechisms state, “In the Bible a mark on the forehead is a symbol of a person’s ownership.  By having their foreheads marked with the sign of a cross, this symbolizes that the person belongs to Jesus Christ, who died on a Cross.”

Thus the ash is a symbol that testifies to all not only who Christians are—sinners in the sight of God—but also whose they are.  For as David remembers in Psalm 103:13-14: “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him.  For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.”

Christians enter this Lenten season in repentance and reflection.  Our lives are also marked with this great promise and hope: We belong to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who calls us his own.

Danielle DuRant is director of research and writing at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia

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The sun bore down on my neck as I walked through neatly laid stones, each row like another line in a massive book. My eyes strained to take in all of the information—name, age, rank, country—and perhaps also death itself, the fragility of life, the harsh reality of war. In that field of graves, a war memorial for men lost as prisoners of war, slaves laboring to construct the Burma-Siam railway, I felt as the psalmist: “laid low in the dust.” Or like Job, sitting among the dust and ashes of a great tragedy. Then one stone stopped my wandering and said what I could not. On an epitaph in the middle of the cemetery was written: “There shall be in that great earth, a richer dust concealed.”(1)

It is helpful, I think, to be reminded that we are dust. We are material.  When we die, we remain material. It is a reminder to hold as we move through life—through successes, disappointments, questions, and  answers. For the Christian, it is also a truth to help us approach the vast and terrible circumstances leading up to the crucifixion of the human son of God. Beginning with the ashes of Ash Wednesday, the journey through Lent into the light and darkness of Holy Week is for those made in dust who will return to dust, those willing to trace the breath that began all of life to the place where Christ breathed his last. It is a journey that expends everything within us.

There is a Latin word that was once used to denote the provisions necessary for a person going on a long journey—the clothes, food, and money the traveler would need along the way. “Viaticum” was a word often used by Roman magistrates. It was the payment or goods given to those who were sent into the provinces to exercise an office or perform a service. The viaticum was vital provision for an uncertain journey. Fittingly, the early church employed this image to speak of the Eucharist when it was administered to a dying person. The viaticum, the bread of Communion, was seen as sustenance for Christians on their way from this world into another. Sometime later, the word was used not only to describe a last Communion, but as the Sacrament of Communion for all people. It is as if to say: our communion with Christ is provision for the way home. The viaticum is God’s answer to Jacob’s vow, “If God will be with me and will watch over me on this journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and clothes to wear so that I return safely to my father’s house, then the LORD will be my God.”(2)  It is what Christ offered when he said, “Take and eat. This is my body.” The journey from dust to dust and back to the Father’s house would be far too great without it—without him.

Today, our humanity is beckoned to face its humble beginnings on this Ash Wednesday. We are given 40 days to journey with this thought, to follow in the vicarious humanity of the Son where he leads us, until we are leveled by the bright sadness of Holy Week. From the invitation to consume his body and blood in the Last Supper to the desolation of that body on the Cross, we are undone by events that began before us and will continue to be remembered long after we are gone. The season of Lent is a stark reminder that we are, in the words of Isaiah or the sentiments of the psalmist, like grass that withers, flowers that blow away like dust. But so we are, in this great earth, a richer dust concealed. Walking in cemeteries we realize this; communing with Christ we encounter it. Walking through Lent as dust and ashes invites us to see our need for the Father’s unchanging provision: We are offered the Cross, communion and forgiveness, the body of one broken, hope in one raised, and the life everlasting.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) This is a line from a poem of Rupert Brookes entitled “1914.”
(2) Genesis 28:20-22.

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In our contemporary world, a great deal of cultural discussion revolves around the nature of human dignity and human rights. Sadly, there is not a day that passes in which news concerning human trafficking, gross negligence, or large-scale violent oppression/suppression of human thriving arrests attention. International organizations like Human Rights Watch make it their mission to expose and bring to justice all those who would jeopardize the rights of the weakest members of human society. They act, in part, as a result of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948 as a result of the experience of the Second World War. This Declaration called the international community to a standard that sought to prevent atrocities like those perpetrated in that conflict from happening again.

Unfortunately, conflicts and atrocities committed against the citizens of the world continue in our day. Yet, this standard assumption of basic human rights enables the international community to act when those rights are violated. And indeed, human rights—for most people—are a basic assumption in the concern for and treatment of others. One might ask from where the deep concern for human rights comes? How is it that the concern for human dignity has become a conversation—welcomed or suppressed—in all cultures? Is it simply the result of the Second World War?

In seeking to answer these questions, many would be incredulous if the suggestion came that the Judeo-Christian tradition grounds the concern for human rights today. After all, the pages of the Bible are filled with narratives of slavery and oppression, bloodshed and violence. How could this tradition be the ground for human rights?

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