Today’s scripture readings remind me of two homespun lessons I’ve been taught over the years about how to move forward in life in the most efficient and effective way:
- The first lesson is taken from agriculture: Any farmer worth one’s salt knows “You can’t plow a field looking backwards over your shoulder!”
- The second lesson is taken from cragging: Any mountaineer worth one’s salt knows “You can’t climb up a mountain looking at your feet.
These lessons raise an important question, one today’s scripture readings poses: Why do so many people—perhaps some, if not many of us—believe that God remembers, if not is obsessed with, the events of their past?
If you ask me, the answer’s obvious: We attribute to God what we ourselves do! We continuously recount past events replete with every detail to challenge or justify the present, especially “how good everything used to be” (meaning “how bad things are today”) or what others did years if not decades ago that hurt our feelings (meaning “why I have the right to continue to be malign and remain estranged from those people”).
Having become so comfortable living in the past, most folks mired in the spiritual attitude forged by this sin are unwilling to accept the testimony of Scripture which we heard in today’s first reading. Isaiah the prophet quoted the Lord telling him to tell people just like you and me:
Remember not the events of the past, things of long ago consider not; see, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
If that’s not evidence enough, St. John also recalled something people who spend their days remembering the events of the past are likely to characterize as impossible: The forgiveness of sin. About a public sinner, St. John wrote:
“Has no one condemned you?” She replied, “No one, sir.” Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”
The woman was what we call today “hooking up” all over the place. Every Catholic knows that’s sinful not only because it violates the sanctity of marriage—its unitive, procreative, and sacramental dimensions—but also, and perhaps more importantly so, because doing so inevitably has led to a whole host of terrible regrets for a whole lot of folks across the millennia of human history.
Even atheist won’t be deny these data! After all, facts are facts.
How many people today—including us—live in the past, filled with regrets about what we’ve done or hold grudges against those who have hurt us? Memories pop us in our minds unexpectedly and in our dreams.
Again, the data of experience prove instructive: All of this only saps our hearts of joy!
So, I must ask: “Why do so many people commit this particular sin—the sin of blinding ourselves to God doing new things and relish living in the long, bygone past—with hearts sapped of joy?
The answer isn’t terribly difficult to identify: These poor souls are so consumed with the past—looking backwards or down at their feet in shame—that they blind themselves to what’s currently transpiring and thus are incapable of seeing anything that differs from the past. Furthermore, because they’re so mired in the past, these folks aren’t aware of and can’t even identify the great things God not only has done for them but also currently is trying to do for them.
With what outcome? It’s dirty, little secret everyone knows about these folks and feel powerless to change: Their hearts and thus, their lives, are void of joy.
It’s truly sad to see such joyless people dithering they lives away, grasping onto and unwilling to let go of the past. The attitude underlying this spiritual malady is like a farmer who looks backwards when the goal is to plow a field or a mountaineer who looks down at one’s feet when the goal is to ascend the mountain. Both have chose to be blind and incapable of seeing what’s right before their eyes!
In the words of Isaiah, “The Lord said: I am doing something new! Now it springs forth….”
The solution to this spiritual malady is so obvious it has defeated the logic of so many people for two millennia if only because the power of evil is so far more alluring than is the challenge of the good. Yes, it’s true: Sin is so easy to commit while good is much more difficult to accomplish!
But, if we’re to awaken from being “sleepy” Catholics in what remains of this season of Lent, and become “WOKE” Catholics, the important question we need to answer is: Where does each lead?
In today’s epistle, St. Paul reminds people suffering from this spiritual malady that when we know Christ Jesus as the Lord—to “know” meaning to “experience” Christ Jesus as the Savior—all of that stuff in the past accounts for what St. Paul called “rubbish.” That is, it’s to be tossed into the garbage and transported to a far-away dump to rot and provide fodder for vermin...in this instance, the “vermin” being those who live in the past.
St. Paul wants us to embrace this lesson: The past isn’t what God matters to God, the present and the future are all that matter.
Why?
As Isaiah told us, God is “doing something new.” That is, stop living in the past—stop being a “sleepy” Catholic who frets about all that’s gone bad in life and is so wrong and unjust so as to conclude that all one’s life accounts for is nothing but rubbish.
That’s what people who live in the past conclude!
Instead, St. Paul wants us to become “WOKE” Catholics who experience God’s forgiveness in Christ Jesus and is able to live in what God is doing today—the good that comes the barren fig tree we heard about in last week’s gospel and the woman who was living in sin we heard about today.
If God can work marvels with barren fig trees and prostitutes, imagine what God can do with each of us!
That’s the challenge today’s scripture presents us this fifth Sunday of Lent: To recall the promise of Christmas Eve—“…they shall name him Emmanuel, which means ‘God is with us’.” Now is the time to arise from being “sleepy” Catholics and to see with clear eyes that God is “doing something new” by committing ourselves to “return to God with your whole heart and experience God who is gracious and merciful.”
How might we do that?
As Jesus said to the woman caught in sin, “Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”
What that means in actual practice is that upon awaking each morning this week, conduct a memento mori by recalling what St. Paul wrote in today’s reading from his Epistle to the Philippians:
Just one thing: forget what lies behind but strain forward to what lies ahead…continue [your] pursuit of the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling…in Christ Jesus.
When we experience “God is with us” not with our minds but in our hearts, those of us who have been preoccupied with the past will begin to experience our original identity as God’s beloved, not as the person we’ve made of ourselves in the past. Then, living in the present, what our Catholic faith teaches today—as it has for two millennia—will be our personal experience: God has saved us in Christ Jesus by bringing life out of what appears dead and joy out of what has caused so much unhappiness.
Then, this at each day’s end this week the proof that we took seriously what Jesus taught—“Go, and from now on do not sin any more”—will evidence itself as we’ve spent the day as “WOKE” Catholics who have personally have experienced what Psalmist wrote:
The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.
Of course, none of this is new.
In his treatise “contra Haereses” (“Against the Heresies”)—yes, living in the past is a heresy—St. Iranaeus of Lyon wrote:
...the glory of God is the human fully alive, and the life of every human is the vision of God. (4:20:7)
The only way to be truly oneself—a creature crafted by God in His divine image and likeness—is to live through and for God—the Creator of all.
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