Fifth Sunday Lent 1997

Fifth Sunday of Lent 1997

Transforming our relationships

So we’re two weeks from Easter, and again thinking about Lent as a time of deepening. That is one way of thinking about Lent at least, in light of which these readings take on a new light, and an interesting one too. Because what we have here, especially in this reading from Jeremiah, is a kind of intimation of Easter, an intimation of the things to come. Presumably we have been (and I am afraid I have not been) industriously attempting to deepen ourselves, and out of that deepening, - for instance, last Sunday’s deepening of the sense of sin -, comes an intimation of things to come. Jeremiah puts it in this wonderful metaphor of God writing the law in our hearts and no one having to teach anyone else about God because everyone will know God. What he’s talking about, of course, is the transformation of our relationships with each other and with God. And that is where, if we have deepened the sense of sin, we should become more acutely aware of those things that obstruct the connections between us, and they are multiple. But the transcending of sin precisely creates this new situation wherein our life is not lived under some onerous external force, however benign in its intention. We are rather animated to live a Godly life with each other, and a Godly life means precisely that all of these distinctions between us, all the ways that we normally relate to each other in terms of power in one form or another, dissipate, so that we can look levelly at each other, at all the others, and welcome each other into our own lives.

This is beginning to sound like a Hallmark Card..., and it can sound like a Hallmark Card, and too often it does sound like a Hallmark Card. (I suspect that everybody has experienced the diznification of Christianity in one way or another) But that is where these two readings, one from John and the other from the Letter to the Hebrews, are so crucial. They spaek of that transformation whereby we can live in a way in which power has nothing to do with the way relate to each other. SoI don’t have to say, "you oughta do this," or, "your problem is," or "let’s reason together;" all these ploys that we use, however subtly, to disguise our desire to be in charge, not just of ourselves, but of everybody else. All those go away and nobody has to teach anybody, and therefore we are fully available to each other in our own transformed humanity. But the process of getting there..., that’s another story, and that’s where Disney and Hallmark Cards cannot fit, because it means the death of this old self. The death of this old self that wants to be in charge, that wants the kind of security that comes from this specious sense of self-sufficiency that we all live on, and live out. To move where our very life is truly, truly, truly, in the strictest sense of the word, shared life means to use the Christian metaphor of the Cross: "when I am lifted up, I will draw all people to myself..." John who is the author of this Gospel is expressing his regular ironic sense of hope by speaking of the Resurrection and the Crucifixion at the same time. When I am able to transcend this power-mongering that holds me together, then I am available to everybody.

So, two more weeks before Easter... A new Covenant, not written out there, but written on my heart. God’s law written on my heart which simply says, "you shall be for each other, absolutely for each other." Finally, as a kind of epilogue, the thing that has come out of my really half-hearted Lent is a recurrent problem that I have, and maybe you do too. And I lay it out in the hope that this is a common problem, because I think it is, and these readings emphasize the depth of it. It is very nice to be okay with my immediate people, with my family, worrying about my kids, worrying about my classes, listening to all these immediacies. But then every once in a while I am jarred out of that. Dieudonne called me from Haiti to say that this week the Haitian police had picked-up him and four of his friends and beaten them severely, for no reason at all. What I’m getting at is this: here is a kid that I know very well, he calls me Dad, and for whom I have really paternal feelings, but who is living in a society that is utterly irrational and brutal. I watched the Albanians act like a bunch of three year olds, like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies has come to life as people run around merrily shooting one another...

How is all of this to be put together? How do I move beyond the tight little island that I think is within my control and manageable? In some sense I don’t even know how to talk about this, much less how to do it. How am I to be connected to the Albanians, the Haitians, and the people in Zaire? I think I am to be connected in some way, and, as I said, I don’t know how. It is very useful for me and for everybody to be jarred in this fashion. Here we have a whole planet going mad... The Schwarzenegerization of the world... which is paradoxically the opposite number of its diznification. How can we live? Well, that’s what we have two more weeks to worry over for; to try to deepen some understanding of it.

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RT 6 26 97