Forgiveness

Now let us do this little at the beginning of our Lent that we strew ashes upon our heads to signify that we ought to repent of our sins during the Lenten fast.

A little over 1,000 years ago, a Benedictine abbot, Aelfric of Eynsham, told the story of a man who refused to go to church on Ash Wednesday. Just days later, the man was killed during a boar hunt. Aelfric told that story in an Ash Wednesday sermon.

The story did not turn on a sudden death; for Aelfric and his audience, that was commonplace and familiar. What made this story startling, what interested Aelfric, was that here was a man who had not taken his chance to repent, and had died in sin.

He had died and would not rise again. Here was someone who had died forever. Lent begins with a day of ashes (dies cinerum). Aelfric explains, in a passage that has been quoted over and over again, that the ashes are a sign of repentance of sin.

In Aelfric's time, the idea that Ash Wednesday called us to account for our sins was already familiar. The custom of a Lenten fast began very early indeed, but there was some debate about how long Lent should last. Agreement was reached that a 40-day fast was what was required; as Sundays could not properly be fast days, Ash Wednesday was fixed as the marker for the beginning of a Lenten fast of the right duration. 

Christians then began to focus something of what they knew about sin and repentance on this particular day. Little by little, Ash Wednesday became a focus for our understanding of Lent and what we think about our own wrongdoing.

Because sin is a liar, and deceitful, you can never be sure where it is, or what it is doing. As I will try to explain, we routinely underestimate sin. We think we can see it and name it, and we miss the mark. It is the fundamental characteristic of sin that it misleads and misdirects; (which helps to explain why we are so good at seeing it in other people, but blind to it in ourselves). 

It is a bit of a commonplace to suggest that we are not nearly as serious about sin as we were. That is perhaps because we are so thoroughly deceived and have become so confused. We are rather prone to saying that we are no longer serious about sin. In a wonderful aside, the Dominican writer Timothy Radcliffe suggests that part of our problem might not be that we have become indifferent or insensitive to sin, but that we are, in fact, too anxious.

If anything, our society suffers from too much guilt for our failure to be the wonderful parents that our children deserve for our wealth and comfort in a global society in which millions die each year of starvation, for our share in the despoliation of the planet. Such guilt, an anguished psychological state rather than an objective recognition of failure, may render us hopeless and helpless. 

Many people instinctively switch off at any mention of Christianity because they already feel so loaded down with half-suppressed guilt that the last thing they need is to be told that they are sinners. Read more on the other side.

↪ Forgiveness in Jesus' Teachings

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