Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, the forty-day period leading up to Easter. On this day Jesus says: "Beware of practising your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven" (Mt 6: 1). The reward for human beings has a value that no earthly inheritance can match: the love of God. And it is a goal that blends with the desire for Heaven: our eternal homeland.
Francis: the essential is the Lord
Pope Francis in the Mass with the rite of blessing and imposition of Ashes, on 22 February 2023, recalls that Lent is "the favourable time to return to what is essential". A return to truth. A time of grace "to return to what is essential, which is the Lord." An opportunity to "remind us that the world is bigger than our narrow personal needs", "to restore God’s primacy in our lives", not just the "spare moments".
Return to what is essential, which is the Lord. The rite of ashes introduces us to this path of return and addresses two invitations to us: to return to the truth of ourselves and to return to God and to our brothers and sisters. First of all, to return to the truth of ourselves. The ashes remind us of who we are and where we come from, they lead us back to the fundamental truth of life: only the Lord is God and we are the work of his hands. That is our truth. He is the Creator, while we are fragile clay that is shaped by his hands. We come from the earth and we need Heaven, Him; with God we will rise from our ashes, but without Him we are dust. And while we humbly bow our heads to receive the ashes, let us then bring back to the memory of the heart this truth: we are the Lord's, we belong to Him. He "formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life" (Gen 2: 7): we exist, that is, because He has breathed the breath of life into us.
John Paul I: we must be like Abraham before God
Rewinding the recent calendar of Church history, it can be seen that 6 September 1978 was a Wednesday. Not the first day of Lent, but a Wednesday in which the words of Pope John Paul I resounded. In his first general audience, dedicated to humility, Pope Luciani dwells on this great virtue, which the Rite of Ashes also exhorts us not to forget. Being humble, Pope John Paul I emphasises, means being small before God:
To be good, however, it is necessary to be in place before God, before our neighbour and before ourselves.. Before God, the right position is that of Abraham, who said, “I am only dust and ashes before you, O Lord!” We must feel small before God. When I say, "Lord I believe" I am not ashamed to feel like a child before his mother; one believes in one's mother; I believe in the Lord, in what he has revealed to me.
Paul VI: we must rebel against the slavery of external needs
In the penitential rite of Ash Wednesday of February 11, 1970, St Paul VI emphasizes that worldly models are actually chains from which to free ourselves. And he urges us to turn our gaze towards the "school of the Lord" to "bring life back to where death is."
"The Ashes - this morning I imagine you have all received this sign of death and you have felt the thrill of this sign with the terrible words that accompany it: "Remember that you are dust, you too, and unto dust you are destined to return." It sounds almost funereal and ominous this cry but it is made precisely to invoke strong feelings in our spirit. Another way to celebrate this period, which touches not only our spiritual life but also our bodily life, is fasting: the need to abstain and rebel against this slavery of external and material needs. And this for as long a time as Christ imposed on himself prior to his gospel ministry.
John Paul II: conversion is the way to heal the human being
In the Lenten season over which he presided on 20 February 1980, Ash Wednesday, St John Paul II indicates a way of liberation for humanity that leads to God. This way, indicated in the Gospel, is conversion:
Converting to God as the Church desires in this forty-day period of Lent means going down to the roots of the tree, which, as the Lord says, "does not produce good fruit" (Mt 3:10). There is no other way to heal mankind. Today's "liturgy of death", which is expressed in the rite of the imposition of ashes, unites, in a sense, this first day of Lent to the last day, the day of Good Friday, the day of Christ's death on the cross. It is precisely then that the words that the apostle proclaims in today's second reading are fulfilled, when he says: “We beseech you in the name of Christ: let yourselves be reconciled to God. He who had not known sin, God treated him as sin on our behalf, so that we might become God's righteousness through him. ”
In the reality of conversion, of reconciliation with the eternal Father, the path of life beyond death, the passage from dust to God, is embedded.
