Dear One and All,
O’ love divine, What have you done! The immortal God has
died for me! The Father’s co eternal Son bore all my sins upon
the tree; the immortal God for me has died! My Lord, my love
is crucified.
Charles Wesley StF 278.
As I write this letter Ash Wednesday and the imposition of ashes at a service at The Mint still holds a powerful image in my mind’s eye. ‘From dust you come, and to dust you shall return’; powerful words. And in the hymn Wesley asks ‘What have you done?!’
Indeed, what has God done? Lent gives us a time to reflect on this and to give full voice to our prayers and praise of God during Holy Week and supremely on Easter Sunday. God is a mystery. There are libraries full of theological and philosophical explorations of the nature of God. For me, simply, God is. I cannot fathom the depths of God, even if T.S. Eliot invites us ‘never to cease from exploration’. In a sense, I suppose, God expects us to seek him out ( Mt 6:34 etc) To keep the rumour of God alive.
Charles Wesley is correct in part. God, in the second part of the Trinity, the Word made flesh, has really died. He was not pretending. In Christ, the household of God knows what death is. God knows separation in the death of the Son. What has God done? God’s love for human beings, the created order, is given full vent and that is what God has done. In Christ, the full exposition and revelation of love is revealed. In Christ’s magnificent self-offering, love wins through. Even in the depths of agony, the seeming triumph of the evil men can do, the resurrection light of Easter and a new dawn for humankind is revealed. What has God done? – ‘Is crucified for me and you, to bring us rebels back to God’. That what God, in Christ, has done. Let’s bend the knee and bow our head.
The ashes of Ash Wednesday may represent many things, escape, despair, hope, justification. They may also signpost us to the actions of God in the world. This holy Eastertide, may we know ‘we are but dust’ but know too that we ‘rise with Christ’ for this is what God has done and has done so in pure and undefiled love.
Every blessing,
Simon.
Revd Dr. Simon H Leigh.