Homily for Seventh Sunday of Ordinary time
We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, prisoners of our past simply because we are also the products of it. An interest in the past can be tremendously healthy when it clarifies our identity and illuminates the world in which we now stand. Like an old tree, the deeper the roots of a community, the more secure and confident it is. A sympathetic awareness of the past, then, leads to a deeper understanding of the present. We really do not know who we are until we know where we have come from.
But all interests in the past are not so helpful or healthy. Four particularly unhealthy approaches will be familiar to most of us: The first unhelpful approach we call nostalgia. The nostalgic view of the past will be familiar to may of us. It is a viewpoint that afflicts many church people. Uncomfortable with the present and fearful of the future, this type of person turns to the past for consolation. This is predominantly a negative movement: it is a flight from the present more than a flight to the past. The past is then cherry-picked; it is viewed in s selective manner: the unpleasant aspects of the past are suppressed; all Summer days of our youth were sunny. Most of us hanker after a lost innocence. Memories of childhood fill us with warmth. It was the only time in our lives when we felt completely secure. And the older we become the more we tend to indulge our nostalgia. Recalling the good old days when 'sex was dirty and the air was clean' is a gross misrepresentation of reality. Times of great change are also time of great nostalgia. The insecurity induced by change drives many people back to a supposedly secure world. Hence, many calls for a return of the Latin Mass, evening devotions, Benediction and such practices, 'catch and kick' football, are simple exercises in nostalgia.
Now calls for the reintroduction of the Latin Mass are harmless enough. The Latin Mass is a simple flag of convenience for another world. What is being called for in reality is an abandonment of the unpleasant present world. But this picture of the past is unreal. The past was also the world of grinding poverty and densely populated slums.
Another unhealthy approach to the past could be called the view of the bitter heart. This type of person cannot forget the past for entirely different reasons. These people perceive that a great wrong was done to them or to their people in the past. The past then becomes a great wellspring of bitterness, colouring the whole outlook on the present and the future. The past becomes the bitter, grating axle around which the whole wheel of life revolves. It may well be that a great wrong was perpetrated in the past. But an obsession with that past wrong leads to paralysis in the present. This view of the past is very evident in every area of civil strife. Northern Ireland is but a local familiar example. Whole communities are infected with contrary interpretations of the past and the result is often communal strife and anarchy.
A third unhealthy approach to the past is the great 'What if' approach. Those who have been through tragedy often resort to this view of the past. The past plays in their head like a repetitious record. If things had happened otherwise, the present would be so different and so less painful. I guess this is a road that those who grieve are compelled to walk for some time at any rate. We even see it in the gospels: "Master, if you had been here our brother would not have died!" said the sisters of Lazarus to Jesus. If the past were otherwise, the present would be so different.
Fourthly, and finally, for many people, the past represents an unbearable burden of guilt. This guilt may have its roots in reality or in the imagination. Its source is irrelevant. What is relevant is that in the present the past is experienced as a great burden. Unfortunately, much of this guilt is, on the surface at any rate, connected with morality and religion. Through no fault of their own, the perceive God as a moral policeman, whose notebook is well-stocked with past offences and whose pen is ever ready to add new ones. Again, these people are paralysed by the past, frozen victims of their personal histories.
To all of these categories, the cry of Isaiah is a call to liberty: "No need to recall the past; no need to think about what was done before; behold, I am doing a new deed." And that new thing, that new project, reaches its high point in the work of Jesus. A man who is paralysed and a sinner is brought to Jesus. He simultaneously liberates him and heals him of his past sins. This man, who had been a paralysed prisoner of his past, picked up his stretcher and walked out in front of everyone. The same liberation is promised to those who find the freedom to leave the past in God's merciful hands. After all, it is he who saves us.