Fourth Sunday 1997 #1

I will be who I will be

I have two preliminary remarks. One is that I’ve prepared the wrong Mass formulary today; this is where the Sunday cycle and liturgic cycle collide, and I thought that the Sunday cycle always took precedence, but today for those of you who have prepared readings for yourself, this is supposed to be the Feast of the Presentation... Well it ain’t here. That’s my mistake. Secondly, this reading from Paul has been commented on in a number of ways and I think that one of the most troubling ways is contained in the suggestion that Paul was really unhappily married. Paul had a really unsuccessful marriage, and it’s out of that experience that he talks about the unmarried person’s attention being directed to the Lord and the married person’s attention being directed to world. I think that’s right. Another suggestion is that Paul was being ironic here. The great Jerome Murphy O’Connor, the big Pauline scholar who worked here, that’s his theory that Paul was not saying this with a straight face... In any case, I don’t think that it works out historically as he described it.

Today I would like to add what I hope is another dimension to the readings of the last two Sundays which has to do with the notion of vocation. It is this first reading from Deuteronomy that is most useful for that. One of great scholars of the Hebrew Bible, Eichrodt, has a two volume commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures in which he makes this proposal: the entire Hebrew Bible, what we call the Old Testament, can be understood along the line of a single structure and the structure is that of promise. It is quite interesting, and of course it is the two volume’s typically Germanic style filling that proposal in, and I think he makes a really persuasive case. You get the call of Abraham, "I will make you the father of a great nation," you get the Creation story, you get all the great events and all the prophetic literature in the Hebrew Bible, and over and over, this two word phrase: "I will" that is put into the mouth of God is the expression of the Jews’ understanding of the way the world is constructed. "I will do this." In fact, the great Jewish writer, Martin Buber, translates the very name of God which comes out of the Exodus narrative, you know, God’s speaking to Moses out of the burning bush and saying: "Yahweh is my name." That Hebrew word Yahweh has been translated in a variety of ways, but Buber suggests that it is best translated into: "I will be who I will be," or "I will be there when I will be there." I think you can push this further and say the whole New testament is built the same way. If you look at the end of the Gospel of John, it says, "I will send a spirit... I will be with you all the days of the world, even to the consummation of time." What do we do with that? One thing is to back away from that theological notion and simply notice something that I think is badly overlooked by most of us in North America today: that all life is promissory. I think the standard view is that we have certain endowments and gifts, and what life consists of is the progressive unfolding and achievement of those initial endowments. In other words, you have a radically individualistic understanding of how life is built: "Here I am, this little bud, and if everybody would just get out of my way, I’m going to flower." So much of our teachings, so much of the society, Mike Harris’ bleeding insight, if he has any, is very much along that line.

If you look more closely at human life, that’s exactly not how it works. Life itself, no matter how you read it, whether you read it religiously or not, absolutely depends on promises, and I don’t mean promising to be somewhere at 8:15 and then showing up at 8:30, or "the cheque is in the mail." I don’t mean promises like that. I mean that life only becomes livable to the extent that somehow I have some assurance that I can move forward. I mean, if you look at little kids whose lives are stymied, stunted, the words themselves are telling, it is precisely because there has been no one there to promise them anything. Nobody was there to assure them that there is going to be a tomorrow, and I’m going to be a part of that tomorrow. I suspect that everybody in this room has had at least some experience with a personality that has been dwarfed precisely by the absence of that promising other. Even if each of us is to look at his or her own gaps, the origin of these gaps is precisely that same absence. The promising other... Without the promising other, there is no life. From that perspective, what is life? Life is the response to the promise.

I am going to make a proposal which is not immediately apparent but I think that it makes sense. What is the absolutely fundamental thing that makes us humans human? It seems to me that it is the desire to be faithful to the truth. If you don’t have that at the starting point of human existence, then there is absolutely no place to go. I mean what follows in the wake of the absence of that sense of fidelity to the truth is utter chaos. If one were to do a social analysis regarding whether our times are more out of joint than most or not, then my suspicion is they are because I think there is more untruth, more unreliability, and more unkept or phony promises than there has ever been during the history of our race. Television is ninety percent unkept or phony promises. and yet that is where most of us live, or, at least extraordinary ranges of our lives originate there.

The whole religious thing originates, I think, when people feel themselves addressed by this promising other: "I will be who I will be..., I will make you the father of a great nation, I will show you a land flowing with milk and honey..., I will be there." For me to be religious is to precisely structure my life along the line of that promise in a dialogue with that mysterious promising other. In other words, we keep coming back to the same basic religious reality which is me and this mysterious other who in the most drastic statement of it from the Book of Job enables me to say: "even though He kill me, yet will I be faithful to Him." Of course this is where religions diverge: who is the promiser, and what is being promised?

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, this is where my life comes into conflict with all sorts of other things going on, or ought to but unfortunately it doesn’t because we are all willy-nilly living in a world where promises are made: "This is real, this you can rely on, buy this and this will happen, get your BA and this will happen..." The sense of conflict arises from what promises I listen to and on what promises I construct my life. My life is misshapen because I listen to contrary promises and try to be faithful to both sets of promises.

So all I want to do is to propose to myself and to you that we look again, first of all, at the central conflict between us would-be Christians in a society that says: "oh, no, no, it’s all there inside you, if everyone would get out of your way there would be a glorious automatic unfolding of all this potential." But then to make the further and, I think, more difficult step is to say that I really want to be faithful to this promiser, even if I don’t know, and never know, in detail the one promising, this mysterious other who says: "I will be with you..." To be able to live in this darkness yet in the hope that that promise is real. That’s the only promise that’s real.

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