Lust, Dust and Glory: A Lenten Voyage

Lent is underway again. A good number came to church on Ash Wednesday to be signed with a cross of ash and to acknowledge both their need to repent, and their mortality. ‘Remember that you are dust,’ we were told, ‘and to dust you shall return.’ Being informed (except in a doctor’s surgery) that you will soon be dead is one of the last great social taboos. Indeed, it is reprehensible even to tell people that they look tired, let alone look old, an absolutely unforgivable sin in a youth-obsessed culture like ours. And there was I, blithely covering people in ash, and telling them that their days were numbered. …



Alas, remembering our mortality does not necessarily guarantee a life of fewer lusts and greater wisdom. It may, for sure, lead us to a gentle generosity; a living lightly on the land, so as to leave a better world for those who follow us. But our reaction could just as easily be that of the hellraisers, the fast and furious who are here not for a long time so much as for a good time. ‘Eat, drink and be merry!’ they say, ‘for tomorrow we die.’



Whatever our instincts, the call to remember that we are dust-destined-for-dust (and then perhaps for glory) might help us with that other Lenten focus, on repentance. This is perhaps more familiar Christian territory, as the business of examining our conscience – trying to steady the ship and recentre our moral satnav – is one that occupies so much of our public worship and private prayer. The key question is always, ‘Who is at the centre?’ It’s a question we answer differently throughout our lives: when we fall in love; when we have a baby; when we accept a religious belief.



It’s also the question put three times to Jesus by Satan in the story of the Temptation in the Wilderness, which is the gospel reading for the First Sunday in Lent (Matthew 4.1-11). Satan first tries to get Jesus to turn stones into bread; then to throw himself from the Temple roof, to see if God would send the angels to catch him. Finally, he encourages him to bow down to him in exchange for unchallenged authority among the world’s most glorious nations. But Jesus is having none of it. God is God and all alone and evermore shall be. And not even the thought of global adulation, or the power to summon angelic armies can begin to make the Son of God usurp the place and power of his Father. It is God’s universe. God is the One at its centre. God alone is the One we are called to worship; and for whom, through the sacred disciplines of Lent, we are called to renew our love.



Jesus is of course willing to provide endless bread for those who know their need of God; or even just for those who are fortunate enough to live on this abundantly fertile planet that he has created to be our home. He will also throw himself, if not off the Temple, then from the Cross into the unknown abyss of death, trusting in the Father not to save him from broken legs or from the natural consequences of his actions, but rather more importantly to hold him, and all of us, in the perpetual embrace of his love.



The fact is that, unlike all those who are impressed by power and drawn like magpies to shiny bright baubles, Jesus understands glory to be whatever reflects the majesty and the self-giving love of God. All of our Lenten thinking, acting and praying is about re-establishing that order of reality in our own lives, so that we crave not a misguided and arrogant notion of our own place in the scheme of things, but rather that we may humbly learn to know God’s place, and by learning that Lenten lesson, come to reap the eternal Easter reward of life everlasting: just deserts for dust-made-glorious.