The Here and Now

Reread Isaiah 43:16-21.

For such simple and beautiful exhortations, this passage is full of moments to dwell on. Today

I notice two more things among others.

1) Building on St. Paul's claim that in Christ there is a new creation, this week, we are again told that God is doing a new thing. As we approach Holy Week and Easter, our lectionary readings move from recounting ancestral promises to claims of new life. We are closer all the time to our destination in God. So close we can say the promises are being fulfilled here and now.

2) The prophet exhorts his exiled people to release their memory. Do not remember former things, he urges, for remembering the old can limit our perception of the new thing rising up in our midst. How do our memories and former ways of being stop us from becoming new? What can't we detect because we are caught up in the past? This was the point of Moses dieing before entering the promised land: no one with any bodily memory of bondage would enter Canaan for how quickly the oppressed can become revolutionary agents of slavery. From the most personal of relationships to the largest of worldly institutions, this is the rub: how to honor and learn from our history without it cutting off the shoots of new growth. Isaiah reminds us that God will use the living water to extinguish our memory of the Egyptian chariots and armies that pursue us out of the past and haunt our present.

If we simply move through the events of Holy Week as a remembrance, we will miss the new thing. If Good Friday is little more than a commemoration of the past, we will miss the new thing. Jesus' death is our permission and encouragement to allow ourselves to die and Easter is our rising. How might we live the events of Holy Week in the present?

Reflection

• How will you observe Holy Week this year? What will you bring to the Last Supper and to the Cross?
• What new thing do you perceive in your midst? What new thing do you pray for?

Prayer

God of living water, as ever, we offer up our deepest thanks for the newness your create. You release us from the troubles of the past. We pray for the ability to perceive or freedom. This we ask in your Holy Name, Amen