It is good to be reminded each year why we come together on Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is the first day of a 40 day period of preparation for Easter, and from very early on the church believed that it was important to prepare for the greatest celebration of the church year, the celebration of the resurrection. Ordinarily, preparation meant fasting, confession of sin, prayer, increased attendance at church, and gifts to the poor.
It might strike you as odd that we need to prepare for Easter, particularly by fasting and prayer. It is odd, because our world doesn’t do this. The ancient church believed that the great feasts of the church—principally Easter and Christmas— were something to prepare for, and preparation looked like fasting, confession of sin, and prayer. The early Christians didn’t make this up: the pattern is all throughout the Bible. Noah undergoes a period of fasting and waiting on the ark as the rain fell for 40 days, before he came out and planted a garden and received a covenant from God. Moses fasted, or waited, in Midian for 40 years before he returned to Egypt to free his people. He fasted on Sinai for 40 days before he received the Law from God and saw God himself. The Israelites waited in the desert for 40 years before entering the promised land. Elijah fasted for 40 days before he encountered God at Mount Horeb. Jesus fasted for 40 days before beginning his ministry of salvation.
And so the early church realized that preparing for an encounter with God, for a celebration, and for a time of renewed gospel proclamation was a Biblical thing. And the best way to prepare was to pray, fast from things that distract us (even if they are good things), increase our devotion to worshiping with the church, and give to the needy.
In the word Martin Luther loved, we need to “mortify” ourselves, that is, put to death our desires, so that we will be prepared to meet God, prepared to celebrate the resurrection of the Son. We don’t earn anything by doing this. God doesn’t love us more and it doesn’t make us better Christians. Fasting can quickly make people self-righteous, if they think it gives them favor with God. We fast because we need it: we are distracted, weighed down by the world, weighed down by our fleshly desires. We need to be purged so that we can see God clearly, and Lent is the great period of preparation and purging, of mortification and prayer, while we wait to celebrate the resurrection again. I once heard someone say, “If you are driving through the mountains with mud on the windshield, taking the mud off doesn’t make you more in the mountains. But it sure helps you see them!” Fasting doesn’t earn our place with God, but it can help us see him!
Ash Wednesday is merely the first day of Lent. Tonight, you will be reminded of your mortality, reminded of your sinfulness, and called to confession, prayer, and fasting. But you are being called to fasting so that you might be ready to rejoice again in the resurrection. Our hope is not in our fasting, prayer, or spiritual disciplines. Our hope is in the fact that the Son of God became man, died on our behalf, and conquered Hell, Satan, and death by rising again from the dead. And now he is at the right hand of the Father, and so we have his Spirit and can enter the very presence of the Father in heaven. This is our hope!
-Steven