1 Peter 5:6 says, “Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you in due time.” But after mourning comes the repentance––the turning around––the dying to self. After his whole life-all of his assets, securities, livestock, and family-has turned to dust and blown away, he cries out to the Lord, and amazingly, the Lord answers.Īt this moment, Job is wholly undone before the presence of his redeemer, and the combination of desperation, loss, and a marked change culminates in Job’s repentance with dust and ashes:Īnd repent in dust and ashes.” Job 42:4-6Īsh Wednesday invites us to mourn and grieve loss and death. The ashes represent humanity’s collective and individual sins that blaze in a conflagration of destruction, leaving selves, families, forests, and cities in a heap of ash.In Scripture, when someone repents with dust and ashes, they are at the lowest point of their lives-absolute rock bottom-a moment of destitution and desperation, but repentance marks a turning point. The dust is a powerful symbol of our humble beginnings and our humble end: “ For dust you are,” says the Lord, “and to dust you shall return.” The ashes stoke up in our memory the Old Testament practice of repenting with dust and ashes.

“It is a curious thing,” mused poet Malcolm Guite, “that we should use ash as a sign of repentance and renewal.”įor over a thousand years, on Ash Wednesday, Christians have attended a service of repentance and renewal to mark the start of Lent that consists of a time of prayer, lament, confession, and the imposition of ashes in the form of a cross on one’s forehead.īut, in our self-absorbed culture where our clothes, hairstyles, and skin routine communicates our worth and status, Ash Wednesday and the gawkish ashen crosses speak a different kind of set-apart life, a cruciform life-one that is found in and through death and radical humility.

Why imposition of ashes