Fifth Sunday of Lent (C)
Behold, I Am Doing a New Thing
by Walter J. Burghardt, S.J.
Isaiah 43:16-21 Philippians 3:8-14 John 8: 1-11
- One of my favorite films from the past has for title Come Back, Little Sheba. The male lead, Burt Lancaster, is a reformed alcoholic. His wife, Shirley Booth, is a devoted woman with a big heart; but she bores him endlessly by ceaselessly recalling the good old days. Remember when...? Time and again she walks out on the porch calling for Little Sheba, the dog that has disappeared, the dog that is a symbol of those bygone days, a symbol of dashed hopes. And for twenty years, these two good people live what Thoreau called "lives of quiet desperation"
First, Scripture. What is it that Isaiah, Paul, and John say about past and future? Isaiah is at once stern and compassionate, sympathetic and demanding. The Jews are exiles in Babylon. Understandably, their memories take over. They look back nostalgically to their ancestors; the liberation from bondage in Egypt, the unforgettable Exodus, manna from heaven. But the Lord, for all His understanding, is not pleased, not satisfied. He charges them: "Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth; do you not perceive it?" (Isa 44:18-19). He wants them to look forward to a new and greater exodus, the return of Israel to Palestine. Their task is not to look back but forward; trust a God who is always faithful despite Israel's ceaseless infidelities; put idolatry behind them and serve the living God.
St. Paul knows his past, knows it well, knows it agonizingly, beyond his forgetting it. "I persecuted this Way [the Christian religion] to the death, binding and delivering to prison both men and women..." (Acts 22:4). "1 not only shut up many of the saints in prison ... but when they were put to death I cast my vote against them. And I ... tried to make them blaspheme; and in raging fury against them, I persecuted them even to foreign cities" (Acts 26: 10-11). He knows, too, the incredible graces God has given him: the light from heaven on the road to Damascus, his mission as apostle to the Gentiles, his elevation to the third heaven. And still he declares: "One thing I do: Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus" (Phil 3:13-14).
So, too, for the adulteress in John. There is indeed a past; for she was "caught in the act of adultery" Un 8:4). Jesus does not minimize it; divine commandment forbade it. He condemns the sin, but not the sinner. The past is past; what concerns him is the future: "From now on, avoid this sin" (v. 11).
Such Scripture opens up a theology. I mean a way of viewing the relationship between God and His people, between God and us. To begin with, the salvation of woman and man, your redemption and mine, is not an event that takes place in outer space or simply in the recesses of the human heart. Salvation has a history; it is chained to times and places; it happens in and through living communities.
That is why the Hebrew people were justified in setting such great store by memory. I recall Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel's startling affirmation: Much of what the Bible demands can be summed up in a single word - remember! Ancient Israel was a community of faith vitalized by memory, a people that knew God by reflecting not on the mysteries of nature but on its own history. To actualize was to retain within time and space the memory and the mystery of God's saving presence. And Elie Wiesel, that remarkable Jewish storyteller who feels guilty because he survived the Holocaust, has reminded us that, for Jews, to forget is a crime against justice and memory: If you forget, you become the executioner's accomplice.
Similarly for St. Paul. Despite the language he uses, he could not really "forget" what lay behind. No advantage in such amnesia. In the book of Acts Paul is ceaselessly telling stories: how God dealt with Israel over the centuries, what God did for the world in Christ, the way God acted towards him, "the very least of all the saints" (Eph 3:8). Each of those stories was important for Paul. To forget any of them was to forget who he was, because to forget them was to forget his story, to forget where he came from and where he'd been. To forget his story was to forget his God.
So, too, for the woman caught in adultery. Despite Christ's "Neither do I condemn you" (Jn 8: 11), neither she nor we can afford to forget her story. Not she, simply because it is her story. Not we, because her story is not an isolated event. The adulteress is all of us from Adam to Antichrist, in need of a Savior, in need of forgiveness. She is the story of salvation, of sin and mercy, of sin committed and sin forgiven.
The past, therefore, is not sheerly a specter to be exorcised from memory. It is part of the human story, of God's story; it is our story. And so we ought to know it, because we live off it. And yet, in this very past the Scriptures perceive a permanent peril: the temptation to live in the past.
Of course the Jews in exile could not forget their history. Remember how they wept by the waters of Babylon?
- If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy!
(Ps 137:5-6)
Of course the Paul who wrote to the Philippians from prison could not forget the blinding flash on the Damascus road, "Who are you, Lord? 'I am Jesus. .' " (Acts 9:5). The danger lay in living on the Damascus road, basking in the glory days - Gentile converts beyond counting, ecstasies for breakfast, "extraordinary miracles" from the touch of his handkerchief (Acts 19: 11-12).
A risk for the adulteress may well have been her sense of guilt. How can a God who prizes fidelity ever forgive my infidelity? How can I expect my husband to forgive me? Above all, can I ever forgive myself? This strange, unique, compassionate man has told me that he doesn't condemn me, that no other Jew in the area dares to condemn me. But how can I live with their leering looks, live with my husband, live with myself?
No, the past was not something to be lived in. The Jewish exiles were told to focus on the "new thing" that was about to spring forth. Paul realized that he had to fix his eyes on the story that lay ahead, the life with Christ that meant growing to the full stature of the Jesus he had persecuted. The woman taken in adultery was to begin a new life - not only "avoid this sin" but get to know and love the God-man who had refused to condemn her.
Which leads into my third point: the spirituality that should emerge for you from Scripture and theology. Briefly, your past is of high importance, because it is part of God's story and yours. It is for ever part of you; without it you would hardly be who you are. In a sense, you live off the past. And yet you dare not live in the past - precisely because it is past. Right here rests a triple peril that parallels the experience of the exiles, the Apostle, and the adulteress.
There is, first, a peril to the Christian community, a peril that rivals the experience of the Jewish community in Babylon. I mean a ceaseless yearning for the past: for the stately Latin of the fifties, the reverence of Gregorian chant, Communion on the tongue alone; for sisters with fluted wimples and priests in rumpled black; for the authority and obedience that marked us off from the Protestant
"Here I stand"; for a clear Catholic morality without distraction from dissenters not in tune with the Sistine choir; for a Church above women's rights and gay dignity, above kisses of peace and protests outside the Pentagon.
Nothing wrong if it is only nostalgia, but disastrous if a Catholic tries to live there. Disastrous when, as for a young Catholic I know, Mass in English does not satisfy the Sunday obligation. Disastrous when meatless Friday is more Catholic than Communion in the hand. By all means, work restlessly to restore what radical reform has needlessly driven out, so much that is genuinely Catholic; for not every change has been inspired by the Spirit. And still, change is part and parcel of the Catholic condition: change in the way the Church thinks, in the way the Church lives, in the way the Church worships. We are ever in exile, a pilgrim people marching through a wilderness, groping for a God we cannot touch, mumbling and grumbling as loudly as the Israelites ever did, making all sorts of human mistakes.
The point is, this is still God's community of salvation; God still acts here. If you find it Babylon, then live in Babylon, not in some bygone utopia. And while you protest our fresh infidelities, give ear to the God who ceaselessly cries in all our Babylons: "Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth; do you not perceive it?"
There is, second, a peril that recalls the prison situation of St. Paul. Whether it's turning 21 or 40 or 65, whether it's an enfeebling illness or a crumbier job or forced retirement, whether it's family problems or alcoholism or a nursing home - whatever the imprisoning situation, I can feel not only different but diminished. I am tempted to hark back to my glory days: Remember when? No, says Paul, let the past be past. Warm memories, of course; my own office has more honorary degrees than living plants. But I have to keep growing till I die; for the goal of Christian striving, oneness with a living Christ, is never perfected here below. The glory days are ahead: life with Christ in glory. And so I must "strain forward" as Paul did, "press on, keep dying with Christ so as to live more fully.
In a word, tomorrow should be better than yesterday; for each day can be a new creation-if I fix my eyes not on a dead past but on a living Lord. A loving Lord.
There is, third, a peril that reflects the dilemma I have imagined for the adulteress: flow do you live with guilt? Even apart from the Catholic horror stories-what Sister Mary Ignatius supposedly did to your psyche - many a Christian seems unable to accept Christ's forgiveness, goes through life wallowing in guilt, afraid of hell, tormented by past offenses, impotent to make peace with his or her human frailty. Not for this did God become what we are; not for this did the Son of God die a beastly, bloody death. Christ "loved me," St. Paul insists, "and gave himself for me" (Gal 2:20). That love persists through all my infidelities So fix your eyes not on yesterday's sin but on today's forgiveness and tomorrow's hope. Repent, yes; but remember, the repentance that saves is not ceaseless self-scourging but fresh self-giving, a new birth of love.
Only two weeks are left to Lent. If you are still searching for some self-denial, simply stop looking back. "Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old." If you want really to rise with Christ, echo what he himself is singing to you: "Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth." Come to think of it, in the Christian story you are the "new thing." Why not spring forth?
Dahlgren Chapel,
Georgetown University
March 20, 1983
(Reprinted with permission from Still Proclaiming Your Wonders, pp. 45-50. Order this, and other resources, at a discount through the Homiletic Resource Center.)