Sermon for Ash Wednesday, 2026
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Tonight’s Gospel speaks of not disfiguring your faces on the very day when we disfigure our faces. What are we to make of that?
To answer that, there’s another question that must be asked: When Jesus said these words, did He mean to say that no one should ever use ashes? If so, what then of the king of Nineveh? You’ll recall that when the word of the prophet Jonah, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” reached the king of Nineveh, he arose from his throne and laid aside his robe, covered himself with sackcloth and sat in ashes, and decreed that all of Nineveh should fast in the hope that God would turn and relent from His fierce anger. What then of Job? After all manner of adversity and calamity had befallen him, he sat in ashes. And later, after the LORD had rebuked Job for his impertinence, Job repented in dust and ashes. What then of the king of Israel and the people of Israel, who heeded the word of the Lord spoken by the prophet Joel, “Turn to the LORD with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning”? Sackcloth and ashes have been used by the people of God to indicate penitence—that is, contrition and sorrow for sins—from time that cannot be counted. Did Jesus mean to negate all of this, or worse, contradict the Old Testament regarding the fruit of repentance that was wrought by such penitence? Surely not. Nor did Jesus speak against fasting. Although He says here, “anoint your head and wash your face; do not appear to men to be fasting,” He does not mean to say, “don’t fast.” In fact, in these words, He expects that you will, for He does not say, “if you fast”; He says, “when you fast,” which is the kind of language that led Dr. Luther, in his Small Catechism, to prescribe that “fasting… is a fine outward training, a good external discipline.”
What is the point, then, of what Jesus says here about fasting, and disfiguring the face, and the like? It’s not what you do; it’s why you do it. If you do so in order to appear to be fasting to men, then you’re doing it for all the wrong reasons.
Readings:
Old Testament: Jonah 3:1-10
Epistle: 2 Peter 1:2-11
Holy Gospel: Matthew 6:-6, 16-21
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