Ash Wednesday and the consolation of suffering
By Harry Blanchard, TCW:
TODAY is Ash Wednesday, which marks the first day of Lent. It is traditionally observed with fasting or abstinence from meat, and many Christians attend services at which their foreheads are marked with ash as a sign of grief, both in the sense of mourning and in expressing sorrow for sins.
Lent, Holy Week and finally Easter, when Christians celebrate the triumphal resurrection of Jesus, are embedded into the Western consciousness, and yet one cannot escape the feeling that the Lent-Easter experience has become increasingly distant from the popular conception of the world.
The notion of divine suffering is a strange paradox, but this beautiful mystery is demonstrably true in part because it is entirely the opposite of what one would expect from God. Christ alone is able to offer up our (and His) suffering humanity in a redeeming sacrifice. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from Flossenbürg concentration camp shortly before his execution on April 9, 1945:
‘God lets Himself be pushed out of the world on to the Cross . . . weak and powerless in the world, (which) is precisely the way, the only way, He is with us and helps us. Man is summoned to share in God’s sufferings in the hands of a Godless world.’
The thought that our own sufferings can unite us to Christ is a strange consolation, like the warm hum of a nettle sting. The prospect of meeting in a chilly church when a man in a robe smears your forehead with ash, so that you can deprive yourself of booze, or chocs, or fags, or sex, or social media, or gossip, to celebrate the death and rising from the grave of a Messianic carpenter from an obscure province of Jewry two millennia ago is as unappealing as it sounds. However, it is this very suffering and death which mystically brings life to the world when Jesus rises, God and man, to renew our humanity and unite it to God. Christ’s passion is a sublime transmogrification of human misery; God enters into the suffering which our primordial sin brought into the world, and from his death emerges a ‘terrible beauty’ (as Yeats described Ireland’s burgeoning, ironically timed independence) which makes relationship and union with God possible.
Read also: What is Lent and why do we keep it? by Neil Rees, Christian Today
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