We’ve had a lot of time to think about dust and ash this week, haven’t we? The great loss at Notre Dame de Paris, the hours of televised burning and a centuries-old building turning to ash, is a good reason to think about dust and ashes. And then here we are in Holy Week. This is the week where we Christians remember the death of our embodied God, and celebrate his wondrous resurrection.
Holy Week provides us with the perfect opportunity to examine and meditate on just what it means for us to be made of dust. Not in a biological and physical way, but what it should mean to us in a spiritual, emotional way. It’s a chance for us to understand what it means for our daily life.
Jesus was, after all, man. Jesus, the everlasting Word, who separated light from dark, land from sea, and created every sentient and non-sentient thing, become flesh. He became dust.
And this is what we remember on Good Friday. We remember Philippians 2:
“…though [Christ] was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow…and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
In this, Christ is an example for every human who ever has or ever will walk the face of the planet. He emptied himself of his divine form (note: I do not mean that he emptied himself of his divinity, but merely the form) and took the form of a man of dust. And as a man of dust, what was his posture? He was humble. He was obedient. He was the supreme example of how dust-made man should relate to God.
Jesus stands in contrast to the Israelites when they worshipped the dusty work of their own dusty hands, to the citizens of Babel when they sought to a name for themselves and chose to protect themselves with dust-made bricks of dust instead of trusting God, and to Pharaoh, when he stood in rebellion to God, sought equality with God, and refused to bend his knee to his power. Jesus was not defiant in his human frailty, but humbly trusted himself to the will of his Father (Luke 22:42). Abraham, Job, and Hannah show us how this sort of humility looks in the lives of humans who were made in God’s image but had no divine form to give up. They did not strive for positioning with God, or defy him, but were comforted by him in their dusty humanity, recognizing that their frailty was paired with the possibility of near relationship with their creator. They relied on him, not themselves, and humbled themselves to his power over life and death. And, though they were not brought into the glory that only belongs to Christ, they were met by God and drawn into near relationship with him. Their responses to being made of dust then, were appropriate, and they mirrored Christ’s.
So let’s linger with this thought for the last few days of Holy Week. Let’s remember Christ’s humility in taking the form of a man of dust. Can you believe it? That he would not only take on the form of a servant, but take his obedience even to the point that he would die, like every other man? And let’s mourn that it was our sin that made it necessary for him to humble himself to this point. He did not deserve to be degraded to the point of becoming a man of dust, taking it on so completely that he would die. Man of Sorrows, indeed.
He became dust. Willingly. Intentionally. Lovingly.
But Hallelujah, what a Savior! It wasn’t the end of his story.