Ash Wednesday 2025

Matthew 6:16-21

March 5, 2025

“Receive the sign of the holy cross on both your forehead and your heart to mark you as one redeemed by Christ the crucified.”

These words from the liturgy of Holy Baptism should be on our hearts this night, when we are marked again by the sign of the holy cross, and reminded of our own impending death.

Yet aren’t we doing the very thing Jesus condemns? In the Gospel for Ash Wednesday, Jesus tells us not to disfigure our faces, not to appear to men to be fasting, and that we should wash our faces. Are we the hypocrites Jesus warns about?

No, and yes. Ash Wednesday is not about showing off our piety to others. The ashes are a corporate act. We say together, “We are sinners. We need to repent. Our piety cannot save us. Only the Lord Jesus and His cross can.” Participating in the Ash Wednesday ritual is not an act of hypocrisy.

However, the Sermon on the Mount has Jesus repeating three times in succession the warning against hypocrisy. That warning is for us, because we play the hypocrite all the time.

Lent is the call to abandon our hypocrisy and come clean about who we really are. The word hypocrite is the Greek term for an actor, one who plays a part. The actor dons a mask and pretends to be someone else.

Jesus is concerned that when we give offerings, when we pray, and when we fast, we’ll just be playing a part, donning a mask. Inside, we’ll still be the same sinner, unchanged by God’s Word.

The twenty-third chapter in Matthew is a sermon on hypocrisy. The hypocrite tells other people what to do, but doesn’t do it himself. The hypocrite has his favorite seat at church, and wants others to see him there. The hypocrite loves titles and honorifics. The hypocrite gathers up money, and makes long prayers so people will see how pious he is. The hypocrite focuses on the small rules but neglects the heart of the matter: justice and mercy and faith. The hypocrite does the ritual washing, but his inside, his heart, is never cleansed.

Jesus compares the hypocrites to beautiful tombs - they are painted and adorned, but what’s inside? The stench of decay, bones of the dead.

A few years ago there was a great tree across the street. In a windstorm, it fell down, crashed into our school, requiring extensive repairs. To my untrained eye, the tree had looked sturdy and strong. But after it fell, one could see it was rotten inside.

Is that you - rotten inside? Stephen Charnock said, “It is a sad thing to be Christians at a supper, heathens in our shops, and devils in our closets” [quoted by Michael Horton, The Law of Perfect Freedom].

Have you ever had a relationship with someone, you thought you knew them, but later it is revealed that the person had enormous capacity for betrayal, that the friendship was a lie? It’s shocking to realize, “I didn’t know him at all.” Jesus says we stand in danger of hearing the same words from Him at the judgment: “Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’” [Mt. 7:23]. Jesus does tell us to beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing. Yet most of the time when Jesus is warning about hypocrites, He’s warning us about ourselves. We have an extraordinary capability for self-deception.

Is our Christianity a Potemkin village? The haunting words of Ash Wednesday call us to tear down the fake façades we have erected, the illusion of Christianity, and become true disciples of Jesus.

How can we get rid of our hypocrisy? Stanley Hauerwas says, “Following Jesus requires that we lose our overpowering sense of self.” He’s picking up on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s idea that being a disciple of Jesus means becoming forgetful, that is, we stop thinking so much about who we are and think about who Jesus is and what He calls us to. “The righteousness of the disciples is hidden from themselves.”

This is the opposite of hypocrisy, where the goal is to call attention to ourselves. Everything in Lent is pointing us away from ourselves. The money you obsess about? Give it away. The food and pleasures of the body you love so much? Stop serving the body, and turn the body toward the service of God and neighbor. And despairing of your own righteousness, pray for the righteousness of Jesus, the alien righteousness that forgives all your sins and will heal all your diseases.

That’s what’s etched on your foreheads. The righteousness Jesus gives comes in the shape of the cross. And your own crosses He gives you to bear are designed to turn you away from self-reliance to the One Whose strength is made perfect in your weakness. His grace is sufficient for you.

You are a hypocrite, it’s true. You are a sinner. But there is One who is not. Your Lord Jesus was an actor of a sort: He played your part on the stage of judgment. He was scourged for you, taunted for you, condemned for you, betrayed for you, was crucified for you. In Him is your life. For you have received the sign of the holy cross on your forehead and your heart to mark you as one redeemed by Christ the crucified. +INJ+