Ash
Wednesday 2024
St
Valentine’s Day
14th
February
Readings:
In the name of the Father…
So here we are again for Ash Wednesday on St
Valentine’s Day.
I hope you’ll forgive me a little calendar
geekery.
The Ash-Valentine’s mash up is pretty rare.
It last happened in 2018 and it will happen
again for the final time this century in 2029.
Similarly it happened only three times in the 20th Century.
So we ought to make the most of it!
Well done for being here and not in some
wonderful restaurant.
As it happens we do have candles and a meal to
look forward to!
In fact, according to the C of E, Ash
Wednesday is a Principal Holy Day, so it trumps all other celebrations which might
come on the same day.
You could have saved on the flowers and chocolates
this year, perhaps, if you were brave.
But the day does give us an opportunity to
think about love and lent, love and holiness – not, perhaps, things which we
usually associate together.
If we allowed ourselves to caricature for a
moment:
Love, well, that’s lovely.
All kind of fluffy and nice and kind.
Ah!
Who could be against love?
And holiness, well, we know that’s good and
necessary, but it’s a bit like eating your greens.
Maybe it’s a little bit other worldly and
spiritual – a kind of far away look in the eye.
Or maybe in its Lent iteration its very
austere and frugal:
Self-denial, which may seem hard or strange
when we’re so often told by our society that we ought to love ourselves.
Does anyone love lent?
But for God and for us, love and holiness
ought to go together.
Maybe getting love and holiness together could
refine and expand our vision of both.
We could seek a lent which is both loving and
holy, holy and loving.
Let’s think, then, about God and then about
ourselves in relation to holiness and love.
God is holy, holy, holy.
The most holy: the holiest, supremely superlatively
super holy.
God is holy indeed and the source of all
holiness.
The basic idea of holiness is separation,
specialness, distinctness.
God is set apart.
He is unique.
And in particular he is set apart from all
evil and wickedness.
He is perfectly good and entirely holy.
His eyes are too pure to look upon wrongdoing.
But God’s holiness is not only separateness
but also expansiveness.
It is a spreading holiness:
A holiness that can make holy.
The Holy God is light.
God’s holiness shines forth.
It scatters the darkness.
God is love.
He is the loving fellowship of Father, Son and
Holy Spirit.
He made us from love, in love, for love.
God loves and loves and loves.
He is an inexhaustible fountain of love.
He is love all the way down.
God is rich, overflowing, abundant, generous
love.
The Bible is a love story:
God is the husband; we are the church he pursues
to be his bride.
Jesus our champion kills the dragon and gets
the girl.
God’s love is holy:
He loves what is good and right and pure and
healthy.
And God’s holiness is loving.
God’s holiness is not a cold light but a warm
light:
A fire which both purifies and welcomes us in.
The light not only of the operating theatre
but of the family hearth.
So as the people of God we are called to be
godly, to be like God in our own creaturely way.
As children of a loving and holy Father, we
are to bear something of the family likeness.
God says to us, “be holy as I am holy.”
And he also says, “love one another as I have
loved you.”
Holiness was at the heart of the Old Testament
law.
But that holiness of the law is truly
summarised by the first commandment to love God and the second, which is like it,
which is to love our neighbours.
Jesus will ask the repentant Peter three
times: “do you love me?”
That’s the great question!
Love is the greatest virtue:
The bond of all the virtues:
The more excellent way.
There could be no true holiness without love; no
true love which is not holy.
Holiness, it seems, is not only separate from
evil, it reaches out to the world in love.
The two or three historical Valentines, and
indeed all the martyrs, give us a picture of holy love.
They have a love stronger than death.
They love something even more than their own lives.
Theirs is a holy love which warns against contamination
and compromise.
They tell us that love and holiness are worth
living and dying for.
That there is a sense in which we cannot both
love the world and love God:
We must choose love.
If we want to know what a holy and loving life
looks like for a human being, of course, we must look above all to the Lord
Jesus Christ.
His love and holiness were often misunderstood
and maligned.
He ate with sinners in a way that scandalised
the holiness police.
He didn’t keep the sabbath rules in the way
that the church wanted, so who knows what he might or might not have done during
Lent if it had been invented then.
But Jesus wasn’t just in to love and
neglectful of holiness.
He said that his followers would need a
righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and the pharisees:
A holiness not only of appearances, but of the
heart.
Jesus would have us tithe our herbs, but also
attend to justice, mercy and faith.
We need not only to white-wash the outside but
to let the light into the murky depths of our souls.
Jesus calls us to a real and deep repentance –
to turn from sin back to love.
Jesus shows us what true love and holiness
mean and look like.
This is love:
Not flowers and chocolates and bad verse, but
that Jesus loved us and gave his life for us, an unholy people, to make us
holy.
Greater love has no man than this, that he
lays down his life for his friends.
Indeed, Jesus goes further: he dies for his
enemies, for the unlovely to make them lovely.
Love did not simply overlook sin: it was too
holy for that.
Love required atonement – at one ment.
Sin estranges us.
It harms love and holiness.
It pollutes.
We needed to be reconciled to God and God to
us.
God the Son was the atoning sacrifice, the
propitiation for our sins.
God Himself absorbed and spent his holy anger,
his wrath, which is itself an aspect of his love, that we might enjoy his holy
love.
May God grant us a loving holiness and a holy
love.
Let us pray this Lent for a more perfect love
which drives out fear that we might love God and love our neighbour with the
love which comes from the God who is Love.
And so to God the Father…
* * *
https://marclloyd.blogspot.com/2018/02/a-homily-on-love-and-duty.html
Simon Vibert - https://metamorphe.wordpress.com/2024/01/31/asceticism-or-amore/?fbclid=IwAR3ahUV6-qRgkflPi8yLHAfmVip3IRbBUUaARK2W4hOLWH8SKYOm6JQbfQ0
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