"Rend Your Hearts": Ash Wednesday

St. Jerome Doing Penance in His Study (c. 1618) by Luis Tristán

“Rend your hearts and not your garments,” the prophet Joel says to us today. Seems like kind of a strange thing to say, right? But if you read the Old Testament, you will disover that the tearing of one’s clothing was a traditional way to express extreme mourning. For example, when Job finds out all of his children have been killed, he tears his garments and prays for death. To rend one’s clothes was understood as a sign of devastation, utter loss.

The ashes we will receive on our foreheads today signify much the same thing. The ashes are not just a reminder about our own mortality; they tell us that we have lost something of immense importance. What have we lost? For what are we in mourning? That special gift from God that we call grace: a sharing in God’s divine life. When we sin, we reject that gift – we fracture that relationship with God. And when we recognize that fact, when we realize what we have lost, we feel sorrow and we mourn.

Fortunately, our God is a merciful God, and he never wants us to remain in that place of sorrow. Instead he calls us back into relationship. When we repent, we receive anew his grace: his love, his freedom, his joy. But we don’t just go back to being the same as we were before – we should be changed, transformed, wiser for where we have gone astray and where God has brought us back.

The ashes we receive will be an exterior sign of our sinfulness, but exterior signs are not enough. As the prophet Joel says, what God really wants is a transformation of our heart. We can go to great lengths in our exterior penance – tearing our clothing, covering ourselves in ashes, or fasting and praying visibly as Jesus says in the Gospel. But none of that will do us any good at all unless we are also changed on the inside, unless we become aware of just how destructive sin is for our relationship with God. We tend to focus a lot on the individual sins we commit, but those are just indicative of the deeper problem: that too often you and I prefer our sins to the love of relationship with God. And so it is that we must learn to “rend” our hearts, to tear them away from the sinful things that they cling to. We cannot learn to love the Lord God as we should until we learn to hate the false things our hearts so often prefer.

Friends, this Lent, let’s take up our different penances and spiritual practices not just with the intention of trying to be a little bit better, a little bit holier, but instead with the desire to be completely new. Recognize what sin always does, what it costs you, and reject it completely. Allow God to transform your heart completely – indeed, to give you a new heart, a new way of living with him. “Rend your hearts, not your garments, and return to the LORD, your God. For gracious and merciful is he.”