ASH WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2022
     In my first semester of graduate school I took a course on St. Augustine, the great theologian of the church in the West.  One day the professor surprised me with this statement:  “For Augustine the problem is sin plain and simple.  But for the eastern father Athanasius, the problem is not that we sin, because we can repent.  The problem is that we die.”  Then in History of Christianity III, which I took two semesters later, when we got to Luther, another professor pointed out that in the famous thunderstorm incident, Luther wasn’t crying out for deliverance from his sins but from impending death.  Scholars think there were a number of incidents that occurred in the young friar’s life around the same time, traumatic events involving a potentially mortal wound and a drowning. The reformer was always keenly aware of human bondage to disobedience, but he was also moved by human frailty and mortality.  He rejoiced  at the sight of the infant Jesus tucked in his mother’s lap.  Look how the all-powerful, infinite and eternal God has crossed the great divide between the deathless divine and the mortal human. God has become dust so that to dust God can return.
     There is an article in this week’s New Yorker about Hans Holbein the Younger, whom the author describes as “the dazzling Renaissance German specialist in portraiture.” Holbein became the premier artist in the court of King Henry VIII of England, but he began his career in the Swiss city of Basel, a thriving center of artistic patronage and publishing. And there in the years 1521-22 he painted a most unusual portrait entitled “The Dead Christ in the Tomb.” The art critic writing The New Yorker article calls the painting “one of the most indelibly shocking images of all time.” “I will not forget,” he continues, “no matter how hard I try, my own first look, in the Kuntsmuseum Basel at that . . . what? That thing.' 
     My curiosity was piqued, and I decided to look at the painting for myself. I couldn’t, of course, fly to Basel to see the original, but I found a number of reproductions online. That was enough to make me appreciate the author’s shocked response. I can’t imagine what it would be like to stand before the original. The painting is a foot high and six and a half feet wide; its effect is to make you feel as if you were shut in the tomb with Christ, now dead three days. His body shows unmistakable signs of deterioration, especially around the wounds in his hands and feet. It is as powerful and terrifying an image of the true humanity of Jesus as one can imagine —  his body, like every living body of flesh and blood, has become a corpse. 
     After seeing this painting Fyodor Dostoyevsky remarked, “Such a picture might make one lose one’s faith.” It can just as readily deepen one’s faith. For with the unsparing horror comes intense wonder — at what it costs God to love us, at how far the Lord Jesus was willing to go for us and for our salvation, at the unimaginable power of God that will bring him out of this tomb into life. In his painting Holbein signals the resurrection to come. The right hand of the lifeless Christ is lying at the center of the picture — the third finger slips off the edge of the base supporting the body and is extended toward the viewer. It is a deliberate reminder that in three days time this empty corpse of what was once a living man will be brought back to life, whole and incorruptible.
     “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Holbein’s dead Christ in the tomb is every human; he comes to the same end as do we all. And shares with all of us the hope to which his skeletal finger points.
     “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return” — this truth humbles us, but it does not demean us. The words speak not to the vanity of our existence but to the urgency of our lives. The fact that our days are numbered, that they are passing, challenges us to use them well. We begin Lent with a detailed litany of our sins. We come together to name what is wrong so that together we may repent, that is, turn away from the old failings and answer Jesus’ call to discipleship anew. “Now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation!” exclaims St. Paul. It is the time for reckoning and recovery; it is the time to start bringing life out of death. Amen.