Ash Wednesday Devotional
Mathew 6:1 – 6, 16 – 21
For us to understand what Jesus is talking about in our lesson today and throughout the Gospels, it is important to see how Jesus viewed the religious elite throughout. Jesus loved to point out the hypocrisy of the Jewish elite. The elite were considered the authorities in the Law. They were essentially religious celebrities, receiving hero worship from the common man.
They may have been in the religious elite, but they weren’t very righteous. They refused to acknowledge God’s Messiah when He came even though they knew the holy scriptures by memory. They were foolish in that they had come to love themselves; they love the notoriety more than they loved the God to whom they were to serve.
The chief seat in the synagogue was a bench that sat in front of the chest containing the scrolls of the Torah. From this bench, the elite could be seen by everyone, and they could see everyone in the synagogue. They loved to stand in public and pray long, loud, elaborate, wordy prayers that they hoped would impress the uneducated common people.
The treasury, the place for offerings in the synagogue consisted of thirteen receptacles where people could make their contributions. Thirteen wooden boxes that had trumpet-shaped bronze funnels on top to guide the coins into the box were placed there. The sound these coins made against the metal funnels would be an indication for everyone of how much money people were putting in.
Some came in with great fanfare, standing back and tossing in their gift for the greatest effect. Others gave with a frown on their face, holding onto their coins as tightly as they could to the very last second. Others probably stopped to make sure that everyone was watching them as they gave their offerings.
The Gospel of Matthew says that some would actually hire trumpeters to go before them so that attention would be drawn to them and their giving. They would come to the treasury and make a great show of casting in their money. As their money fell into the trumpet, it would make a great noise.
Heads would turn and people would stare in admiration at these people who gave great sums of money to the Temple. Imagine the scene as the trumpets blared, the applause rose and fell, and the sound of coins echoed throughout the Temple. These people were not sacrificing for the glory of God; they were doing it for the praise of men.
But Jesus says that none that mattered in the end. These men were nothing but religious hypocrites. To them, religion was a game. They did not have a personal relationship with God, but they believed that their good works and their devotion to the Law would be enough to save their souls. The fact is, they were dead wrong!
The first verse of our scripture warns us about being like these people, it says “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others in order that you will be seen by them. You aren’t fooling them, and you aren’t fooling God.
Our lesson today, as enter the Lenten season, is that we need to focus not on what we want, not what people think, not even that challenges that the world is giving us these days, the fear and the angst, but rather we need to focus on getting ourselves right with God.
A father sent his 7-year-old daughter to clean up her room during the Saturday morning family chore time. She emerged from her room after five minutes and said to him, “I’m done. Can I watch TV?” Suspicious, he went to investigate. Her room looked very clean and tidy. That was until he opened the closet door and was almost buried alive by an avalanche of clothes and toys and other misc. things.
So, he called his daughter back into her room to clean her closet, which she hadn’t considered part of her room. With her Dad watching she got in gear and cleaned her closet, putting toys on shelves, clean clothes in drawers and on hangers and dirty clothes. When she was done she came and hugged him and said “Now my whole room is clean – even my closet – that feels better!”
Lent gives us an opportunity to “clean up our life’s closet” Making sure our inner emotions and feelings are consistent with our outer presentation. We like to present a tidy, righteous appearance to the world, but we all have messy closets full of stuff that we are ashamed of and disappointed in.
In Matthew, Jesus would have us clean our whole soul, instead of having secret compartments to keep things we don’t want deal with, or closets filled with unrighteous stuff that we want to keep hidden from others. But friends Ash Wednesday we are reminded that that stuff might be hidden from others, but it is not hidden from God!
So, we have this period of preparation, of self-denial, of repentance and confession, of putting our spiritual house in order, so that we can be prepared ourselves for the Easter miracle. What we discover as we make those preparations is that there are so many things that get in the way of our true embrace of the risen Christ. They are habits and preferences and inclinations that clutter our souls.
So, the season of Lent comes along to give us time, space, and appropriate reminders that we need to clean house to receive the one we call Lord. To do this well is both a challenging and a fulfilling exercise.
Lent doesn’t have to be a somber time; but it needs to be effective, it needs to be intense. It needs to be taken seriously and rigorously, and we can bring our full selves to the table in the Upper Room on Maundy Thursday. It is worth the strenuous effort, however, as we are enabled to embrace the fullness of the self-sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross on Good Friday and promise of Resurrection so that we can live as disciples of Jesus Christ; and become disciples who make disciples.
Let us not be like the Religious Elite that Jesus berated as hypocrites. Let us be committed to growing in righteousness and in relationship with our Father. Dear ones, it is time to clean up our spiritual room, not just the parts that we show to everyone so that they can be impressed, but we need to clean up the nooks and crannies, under the bed with the spiritual dust-bunnies and the closet, mind you that for many of us those are walk-in closets.
We must not just organize our priorities, but we must discard that which is unholy and toss it irretrievably into the dumpster of righteousness! Then we can say, to paraphrase that little girl, “now my whole soul is clean, even my closet and hidden places”! Now friends won’t that feel better! Amen.