Yet Even Now

There are many occasions that might qualify as Israel’s lowest moment throughout its spellbinding relationship with God. Worshiping the golden calves in the wilderness and the exile would certainly make the list, but what about the locust invasion chronicled by Joel? He vividly describes their havoc:

What the cutting locust left,
the swarming locust has eaten.
What the swarming locust left,
the hopping locust has eaten,
and what the hopping locust left,
the destroying locust has eaten. (Joel 1:4)

Joel’s ultimate concern is liturgical, not economic. This devastation he describes not only threatens the harvest but worship too. If grain and livestock fail, the daily cadence of sacrifice falters. Hauntingly, Joel insinuates that God is threatening the very means to reconcile with him.

The irony that God once wielded locusts against the Egyptians makes the ordeal even worse. The “great army” sent by God against Israel’s former oppressors is now wreaking havoc upon Israel itself. The implication is damning. Israel has fallen to the depths of their former oppressors and deserves to be treated accordingly!

In Lessons of History, Will and Ariel Durant observed that “out of every hundred new ideas, ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace.”¹

Novel remedies for guilt, shame, and sin fail. We cannot hide behind the spirit of the New Age, which tells us that we are just fine the way we are, without shame and guilt persisting like a bad cold. Nor can we purge inequity by embracing the modern mantra “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” without succumbing to exhaustion and defeat. Like the Israelites, devoid of offerings, these modern projects leave us unreconciled, helpless, and lost.

The traditional way still works. “If we confess our sins,” writes the apostle John, “God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 Jn 1:9).

Ash Wednesday is observed annually to memorialize, solidify, and embolden this “traditional” approach to sin — the one that works.

Joel’s message forces us to contend with the depths of our sin so that we can rejoice in the heights of God’s grace. At their lowest point, when the Israelites had become indistinguishable from their former Egyptian oppressors, God declares through his servant Joel, “Yet even now, return to me with all your heart…” (Joel 2:12). Later, Joel himself adds, “Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious, merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” (2:13).

Ash Wednesday does not just rehearse the past; it enlightens the present. The burdens of guilt and shame will trail many who come to receive their ashes. Pestering memories of wrongdoing will crowd their minds, but their ears will hear “yet even now.” They will hear that God is “merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”

A couple of years ago, my son was still learning to talk, and he said, “Daddy loves Henry.” He did not know how right he was. When Joel says that God is gracious, merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, he didn’t know how right he was.

For God would provide what the harvest could not, what our modern programs cannot — a perfect offering. God sent Jesus into the world to take our sins with him to the cross and die to sin, so that we may live to righteousness (1 Pt 2:24). In this “blessed exchange,” Christ took what was ours (sin) and gave us what was his (righteousness).

The ashes we receive on Ash Wednesday symbolize death and decay, the very wages of sin (Rom 6:23), but the pastor forms the ash into a cross to signal that it was Jesus on the cross who suffered death in our stead.

Ultimately, we wear the ashes as a sign of what works and that “yet even more so now” we can turn to the Lord, trusting that he is indeed gracious, merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.

1 Will Durant and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (Simon & Schuster, 1968), 35.