Turn from sin and turn to Christ!
The Revd Canon Dr Michael Leyden
Blog post for Ash Wednesday, 22nd February 2023
The Christian practice of ashing as a sign of repentance goes back to Tertullian (c.155-220), the great north African theologian and apologist and founder of western theology. In his treatise On Repentance, he called Christians to take God’s grace seriously by taking sin seriously: recognising sin’s poisonous, destructive power in our lives and the life of the world and the desperate need each of us has for divine forgiveness and personal transformation. He painted a sobering picture: sin is the rock on which our lives are shipwrecked, and so overwhelmed are we by the wind and waves that we drown. Sin has power. It turns us in on ourselves and makes us selfish and proud and arrogant and heartless. Sin causes spiritual death.
We might wonder whether Tertullian would be well regarded as a preacher or conference speaker today with material like that… But it serves his purpose in setting the scene for repentance. For those who are drowning, the only hope is if someone on the shore offers a plank as a lifeline – like tossing a lifebuoy into the water to be dragged from the waves and dragged to safety. Christ is the plank that God extends into the sea of our spiritual demise and repentance is our corresponding action of taking hold of this spiritual lifeline and refusing to let go until we reach dry land.
In using this metaphor, Tertullian highlights two important theological truths.
The first is that repentance is actually a gift from God. Though it is a human activity, it is possible only because God has acted first in grace and mercy. Mixing his metaphors, Tertullian describes sin as a sickness from which we cannot recover ourselves and for which the divine physician prescribes “the healing medicine of repentance.” Throughout scripture we see the call to repentance on the lips of the prophets and the apostles, even Jesus himself preached repentance in the light of the coming kingdom (Matt. 4:17). Through repentance we receive fulness of life as we turn from spiritual death and turn to God who promises healing, wholeness, restoration, and transformation in Christ.
The second is that repentance is observable. Tertullian is especially perturbed by those who preach inward repentance without any outward sign of an amended life – those who would “shrink from changing their ways” or “who defer such change for another day”. Quiet confessions and liturgical penitential rites do not constitute repentance if they are not manifest in a life that leaves sin behind and seeks Godliness. He uses the Greek word exomologesis to describe the relationship between inward and outward, the confession of the heart accompanied by a life transformed. It comes from the Greek text of Matthew 3:6, where the people are baptised by John having confessed their sins. Tertullian observed that confession leads to acts of repentance: those who came up out of the water were commissioned to live a new life. As St Paul put it, “we have been buried with Christ by baptism into his death…so that just as Christ was raised from the dead…we too walk in newness of life.” (Rom. 6:3-4). Repentance is only real as it is enacted in the decisions we make day by day.
The principle of exomologesis lies behind Tertullian’s reintroduction of ashing. It is based on the Old Testament habit of wearing sackcloth and ashes for mourning. For many in the early Church (and indeed in the Eastern Church, and the later Reformed churches), ashing contradicted Christ’s teaching in Matthew 6:16, “when you fast, do not look dismal like the hypocrites who disfigure their faces so as to show others that are fasting…” But Tertullian argued that Christ was rejecting prideful repentance; outward signs but no inward reality. He argued that ashing is not about pride, but about “enhancing repentance” by “covering ourselves in sorrow for our sins and being humble before God”. Ashing is the outward manifestation of the state of our hearts – we are sorry, and we repent, we grasp hold of Christ because without him we die.
Ashing is not and cannot be the end goal of repentance: it is part of a process. Hence in many parts of the western church we practice ashing at the beginning of Lent. We are entering a season of penitence, when the whole Church is called again to turn from sin and turn to Christ; to take up our crosses and follow him; to take up practices that will conform us to Christ more fully, and to leave behind those things that lead us away from him; to learn to inhabit more fully our baptismal identities that our amended lives might become a witness to the world of the difference he makes to those who would otherwise drown.
Ashing is the outward manifestation of the state of our hearts –
we are sorry, and we repent,
we grasp hold of Christ because without Him we die.
Published 22 February 2023
