The readings given in the Lectionary for Ash Wednesday offer a portrait of tensions in scripture and consequently in faith: God’s judgment is to be feared and, also, God’s mercy trusted and called upon. Suffering may be judgment, or, conversely, opportunities to commend oneself to God and to people. Humility and repentance are to be done publicly and communally, but, at the same time, not performed for social approbation. Today we might add more: sin as structure or as personal wickedness, the toll of repentance on one’s sense of self-worth, the recognition of wrong and the weight of the word “sinner.”

Yet Ash Wednesday, even with its calls to mortification of pride, examination of conscience, beating of the breast, and trembling before the wrath of God, is good for us: and because salutary, a mercy. Even Joel, the prophet whose words selected today are most acutely aware of the mortal danger set to swallow Israel if God’s people do not repent, urges his people to change by reminding them of God’s goodness and tender disposition towards people. Justice and mercy are fundamentally the same, grounded in the goodness of God. In facing justice (easier said than done!), we see mercy. In admitting the illness, we can open our hands for the cure.

There are harmful ways to treat a wound, and it’s true that many have “suffered many things of many physicians… and [been] nothing bettered” (Mark 5:26, KJV). A real question to raise is whether the repentance being suggested by the Church, or the world, is turning toward the fast Almighty God chooses or bowing the head like a bulrush because a posture of misery is supposed to be holy. The invitation and exhortation of Ash Wednesday, the leap into Lent, is to come not before an earthly physician or curate of souls but rather before the true Healer, willing to try, begin, take just one step towards telling the truth of hurt and illness of the soul.

This journey is good, if potentially painful. It is an opportunity to bring up the broken bits we carefully avoid or even cherish so that they can be washed and mended, to speak of how evil in the world and evil in our hearts share a root. Error of all kinds (selfishness, pride, ignorance, lack of attention, avoidance, the desire not to rock a boat), like a wound or an illness, festers if it is not exposed to light and air and medicine. It will sicken us and others.

Like those who fast for praise or seek righteous judgments while oppressing workers, if we do not take the vertiginous look down into the reality of ourselves, we’re neither relating rightly to God nor living honestly in the world. Better, then, harder but much better, to submit these forty days to the mortifying ordeal of being known, by God and by ourselves. Because what comes after the terrible honesty is “treasure in heaven”: the health to receive the rewards of being loved, really truly, eternally.