Ash Wednesday is one of the most universally accessible days in the Church’s liturgical year, offering a simple yet profound reminder: God’s grace is available to all—without exception. This is the firm conviction of our first guest for the Lenten season, James Hanvey, S.J., a Jesuit priest and theologian who currently serves as Secretary for the Service of Faith at the Jesuit General Curia in Rome.
In his conversation with Ricardo da Silva, S.J., James reflects on the universal appeal of Ash Wednesday, saying, “Everyone is drawn to the ashes—for whatever reason. They may not feel that they can receive Communion, but they're drawn to the ashes. And I think it's about helping people understand, first of all, that they have a place here in this community, that they are welcomed and that the grace of this moment is for them.” He goes on to highlight the inclusivity of the ritual, emphasizing, “We’re all in need. How can I judge that your need is greater than my need? This quantifying doesn’t make sense. I mean, we all come in our need to the One that we need.”
Scripture Readings for Ash Wednesday, Year C
First Reading: Jl 2:12-18
Responsorial Psalm: Ps 51:3-4, 5-6ab, 12-13, 14 and 17
Second Reading: 2 Cor 5:20-6:2
Gospel: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18
You can find the full text of the readings here.
Homily for Ash Wednesday, Year C, by James Hanvey, S.J.
“What time is it?” How often have we asked or been asked that question? Sometimes it’s an innocent question. A genuine, simple asking, seeking only to have a factual answer—it’s 10 or 12 o’clock or ‘it’s time to go’ or ‘no hurry, we still have plenty of time.’
At other moments it’s not so innocent. It can carry urgency or menace or anxiety. “Come on, we’re going to be late!” Or “time is running out….”
And so a simple question locates us in time. It reminds us that although time appears infinite, for us it is actually finite. At some level, even such an everyday question like, “What time is it?” awakens us to the strange shape-changing realities of time, and how every aspect of our life is caught up in it. Not only in external ways, by measuring minutes and hours, watching clocks and recording events and the constant torrent of news, information, sound, images—all that flows over us and through us, but in internal ways as well. The memories— that paradox of time regained and lost – joys still held, and regrets for what was said and done, the things that cannot be unsaid or undone— no longer present but still always there.
“What time is it?” Why, it is Ash Wednesday! Each year it comes to meet us, to summon us. But although it returns, it is not some part of an endless cycle. Rather, it is the reverse.
The liturgy of Ash Wednesday has come to tell us something new about time, our time, and to invite us into a new understanding of the time in which we live. The seasons of the liturgy—Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter—trace God’s time within our time. It gives us the new time of encounter. Surely it happens within our time—the time that is always moving towards death—but this is God’s time, a time filled with God’s own life, whose ‘height and depth, length and breadth’ is opened up for us by the quantum reality of the Cross and Resurrection and the inexhaustible life of the Holy Spirit.
For all the seasons of the liturgy move within the Easter proclamation: “Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, the Alpha and Omega, all time belongs to him; and all the ages... “
You see, no matter what time it is, it is always Christ’s time and Ash Wednesday is the beginning of our journey in Lent-time. And the Church that lives in these two times simply asks us to accept the gift. The sign that we do, that we are willing to undertake the journey of Lent, is receiving the ashes: They are traced upon our forehead with the words ‘repent and believe the Gospel,’ or ‘remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’
Many years ago, just newly ordained, I was sent to one of our city centre parishes in the U.K. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing in my first Ash Wednesday mass and liturgy. It certainly wasn’t according to the normal liturgical rubrics—but perhaps being a Jesuit that will come as no surprise! Maybe the best lesson was that of pastoral adaptability!
The Church was packed with city workers—offices, shops, and all the lively variety of people, generations and occupations that can be found in the busy centre of a major city. We distributed the ashes before, during, and after mass as people were attending on their lunch break and needed to get back to their work.
A bit confused and exhausted I was in the sacristy putting things away when I was told there was a long queue waiting outside. I didn’t know what the problem was and thought perhaps they were still waiting to receive communion. But communion was not their real priority. They wanted the ashes. What is it about the ashes that speaks so powerfully to us whatever the condition of our faith or the state of our life? If we saw a pile of ashes at home we’d probably move quickly to clean them up, but not today. Today, they become a symbol of a profound truth about ourselves and the reality of our lives. Each one receives them in our own deeply personal way – we know, and God sees who we are in this moment, a moment of deep, personal truth.
When we accept the ashes we stand before our own mortality. We know our time, and the time of those we love, is limited. No matter what age we are, we touch and are touched by the moment of our death. The ashes remind us that we are frail and mortal; they teach us to ask what really lasts. How much is distraction, illusion, diversion and denial? With the ashes we give up avoidance and stand before the truth not as oppressive but with a liberating clarity: What really matters, what is of real value, on what, on whom, do I build my life? The ashes, too, are the simple confession of our need to repent. In their solemn and simple beauty is an eloquence. No words are necessary only the gesture of truth and sorrow and with that recognition the first step in a new beginning. And while it is at once personal and intimate, we experience that we are not alone.
There is a solidarity in Ash Wednesday, whether one feels inside or outside the Church, we are all together in our humanity, we are one in our need of each other, to seek forgiveness and to make a new beginning.
This is the deep grace of Ash Wednesday and of Lent. Time is not our enemy; we are not imprisoned within an endless cycle in which our end is already determined and from which there is no release.
God in time, gives us time: the time to change, to start again, to begin again. No matter how whispered our words or unnoticed our acts, they are a new beginning for God sees them.
Listen to the readings in the mass today and you will hear God’s voice speaking, pleading, calling. It is the voice of one who loves, who is love, and for whom no one is a stranger. It is this love that sets us free in time, whatever time it is, to love, to change, to begin again. It is the double grace encountered in both formulas for the ashes: marked by the ashes we are covered in truth and humility; we recognize and accept that truly we are dust and to dust we will return. Our dreams and illusions fall away, and we see that all that remains, and will remain, is the Love of God in Christ that never fails us, who knows our frailty but continues to say ‘yes’ to us. And ‘repent and believe the gospel’.
The gospel, which is the charter of our freedom—the grace that sets us free to change. Frees to believe, not in ourselves or the empty fictions of earthly power with its crumbling monuments for these too are dust. But the gospel, the truth and the person of Jesus Christ, is life. It is Christ who breaths his Spirit over all the dust and deserts of our lives and calls us back to life.
When we leave the Church on Ash Wednesday, we do not leave alone, nor do we continue days of Lent alone. We leave as a community; all on the journey, all committed to change whatever needs to be changed in our own lives, to do whatever we can to change whatever we can for the good of others. And from the humility and truth of the ashes, to carry into the world the lighted candle of our lives in faith, hope and love. To do it together. Lent is our journey of hope and transformation—especially in this Jubilee year of Hope—and it lives by the light which it already sees before it: The light of Christ—the lumen Christi of the Easter proclamation which we have already begun to sing, together, in our hearts. The acts of healing and renewal.
The three great and beautiful acts of Lent which we begin today are three practical acts which say, “Yes” to the freedom our faith gives us in the gift of this season.
They are three acts by which we become the ministers and disciples of hope in our suffering and torn world, in our families and in communities. They are the traditional acts of healing and renewal: Prayer, fasting, almsgiving. They do not need to be dramatic or heroic, they only need to be sincere and humble. Prayer keeps God at the centre. In a world which distracts us or offers us so many other gods; in a world where there are so many who claim to be the messiah, our daily habits of prayer keep us centered and grounded.
Prayer is the interior and liturgical ‘sacred space’ away from the shouting crowd and media saturated world which suffocates the soul. In prayer before and with God, we breath; we live; we are refreshed and kept by the peace of the Holy Spirit that fills our hearts with the knowledge and love of Christ. But prayer, too, for our world. Prayer is our act of solidarity – union and communion- with the suffering and anonymous Christ in the lives of so many.
Prayer is our gift and in giving each day we enlarge our heart and our thought so that everyone, especially the abandoned, suffering, lost and rejected, are not forgotten. They are constantly kept before God. For our prayer is our act of resistance against their erasure, our refusal to forget them. In our prayer we hold their faces and their lives before our societies and communities until they are welcomed and restored. God cannot find a home in us until all for whom He has suffered have found their home in us.
Fasting, too, is both the demonstration of the gift of our freedom from the tyranny of our addictions, either our own, or those induced by our consumerist cultures. Fasting, too, from our harsh judgement of others and our miserly words of kindness and compassion.
We can fast out of love and gratitude for our ‘common home’. Making space for nature and refusing to exploit its resources and its life.
Fasting is recognising that we can live happily with less so that others – all of creation – can have the ‘more’ of life itself.
So in these days let us quietly examine how we are entangled, caught, seduced and harassed and made to feel that we are always ‘lacking’ unless we possess this or that, and learn the freedom and harmony sufficiency. Maybe we might even find the courage to choose to have a computer or phone free day, or an hour every day when our technologies are silent. With almsgiving I am always reminded of the ‘widow’s mite’. It was nothing compared to the great gifts others could give, but Christ saw its true value and greatness – He saw her and her greatness. It was not what she gave so much as she gave it with her heart to honour God. It is the beauty in that gesture that lies at the centre of all our almsgiving.
No one saw her but Christ. In our almsgiving perhaps we can ask for the gift of His eyes. To see those that no one sees or values, and to give them what we can from our heart.
The needs are so great and our giving so small, but each time we give from the compassion of our heart – no matter how small our gift or how slender our resources – something is healed, the seeds of the Kingdom are sown, and the heart of Christ rejoices. But, I have already said enough!
I would simply like to conclude with this poem by Mary Oishi. It is a poem which not only captures the real work of Ash Wednesday but of life.
i will smoke again before i die
i will smoke again before i die
but it will not be tobacco in my pipe
no, it will be old hurts consumed, ascending
wisping out into the ethers
it will be all those judgments
of who and what was good for me in life
who and what was bad
it will be all those times i
clung to people places and things
all those times i wearied
and wanted to let go--but couldn't
it will be every useless worry
that never came to pass
it will be every quiet sadness
every disappointment
every insult
every shock
every hard cry
it will be all those false politenesses
all those heavy pressures to repress truths
will reduce to ash and blow away
gone all posturing and strutting just
to cover up the toxic shame infection
i will burn that shame to cinder too
my pipe will be fueled by all those barriers
that kept me so long from
loving this and that about myself
i will burn off all blaming, all projections
i will burn off all the anger and armor that came
from dreaming myself small or in danger
i will burn away excesses:
misinformation medication
illusions expectations
i will leave this life
lean and burned pure to the core
taking with me only what i brought
leaving behind a simple one syllable kiss
that the face of the world will know only as
love
Mary Oishi, 2 March 2006
