Sermon: Transforming the Past

Last week I met a man who'd killed a man.  It was many years ago.  He had served a long prison sentence for it, not in this country.  Like many terrorists, he thought at the time that it was the right thing to do.  You must not press me to go further: he knows I am saying this much this morning, but I have promised to respect his confidence.  This remarkable man - let's call him John for he is a son of thunder - is now researching how we come to terms with the past, what it means to express remorse (his word) and heal memories.  John came to see me because he is asking for the help of religious leaders to try and bring about some reconciliation, if it is possible, with those whose lives he had wrecked.  He wants to understand their story and reach out to those he once hated.  He is asking whether his experience could offer a clue about how a divided, conflicted world might move towards understanding, friendship and peace. 

It was moving to hear John's story.  I have met many people who have felt ‘regret' for their actions and devoutly wished that the past had been different.  There are things I myself long never to have said or done.  But painful though that it is, I'm afraid such agonisings are still too easy.  Wanting the past to be different lets us off the hook because it doesn't require the imaginative leap of asking ourselves what do we do with the past as it is, with its raw, unhealed wounds.  What John was speaking about was a more profound way of looking at the past - his past.  It is what the gospel calls metanoia, ‘repentance', the radical reorientation of the whole person towards forgiveness and grace.  And this change of direction brings a transformed vision of the past, a new way of telling the story.  When we are turned towards the light of God, the past loses its power to cripple us through regret or guilt or shame.  Whatever we have done or been, it no longer controls our destiny.  In Christ there is now no condemnation.

In today's gospel, Jesus inaugurates his ministry in Galilee.  For St Luke, this sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth sets the themes of Jesus' message: good news for the poor, release to captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed: the year of the Lord's favour.  It's a joyful jubilee for the world, because God's kingdom is imminent. It offers a vision to live by and a hope to celebrate.  It is future, and yet its beginnings are already here in God's anointed one. ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.'  So this good news of what is coming transforms what already is: tomorrow's promise makes today's realities of poverty, captivity, brokenness and pain look different.  Jesus tells us that we are not forever locked into the facts of our human condition, however dark and dreadful.  The last word is God's amen uttered in the coming of his anointed Son, his mashiah or Christ whose glory we celebrate in Epiphany.  To follow him and to embrace the signs of his kingdom is to live by promise and hope.  Perhaps that, more than anything else, defines people of faith.  Religion is our refusal to entertain thoughts of despair, but instead to rekindle hope because of the goodness of God.

This way of believing makes us look again at time and history.  Promise and hope not only illuminate and transform the present: they irradiate the past too, take us back to the stories we tell with a different perspective to bring.  We begin to read them in a new light, discern even in the darkest passages and the emptiest lacunae how God was not absent, as we had imagined; but simply hidden, his providence mysteriously at work in the changes and chances of history.  At the end of the story of Joseph in the Book of Genesis, after many twists and turns, he is finally reconciled to his brothers.  And the storyteller puts into his mouth one of the Old Testament's most remarkable speeches: ‘you meant it for evil, but the Lord meant it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing this day'.  Sub specie aeternitatis, from the standpoint of eternity, it all looks different, for the tale can at last be told in the light of its ultimate outcome which is God's great deliverance, his jubilee.  In this sense tragedy brings catharsis; it purifies our vision.  So the medieval theologians could sing of the felix culpa, the ‘happy fault' of Adam's sin that allowed the wonderful self-abasement of a Creator reaching out to his world and loving it to the end to be disclosed.

Jung said that life has to be lived forward, but understood backward.  ‘Understanding backward' means taking a view of the past that is informed by the wisdom and insight that come with time.  This is why John came to see me: he wanted to ‘understand backward', discern meanings hidden in events that would only be disclosed by long and patient attention to his story.  His metanoia, the reorientation of his life, has given him the perspective by which to ‘read' his past in a way that can bring something creative out of what was so terribly destructive.  His experience speaks directly into our Christian understanding of forgiveness, reconciliation and hope.  He reminds us that there can be God-given outcomes in situations that once seemed beyond redemption.  This is the gospel way of ‘living forwards and understanding backwards', for in the teaching of Jesus, to pray ‘thy kingdom come' is a prayer that the past as well as the present and future may become subject to God's just and gentle rule. Indeed, this is an act we are performing here and now.  In this eucharist, says St Paul, we remember the Lord's death ‘until he comes', that is to say, past and future are joined in the actions of remembering and hoping.  Augustine says that ‘it is the mystery of ourselves that is on the altar': our broken, sinful selves, our histories with all their false turns and failures; our human condition in its entirety, yet now at last enfolded in the redeeming love of Christ who makes all things new.  In broken bread and wine poured out, our life is given back to us.  There is the promise of transformation through the crucified and risen one.  We understand backwards, and begin to live forwards in hope. 

This is the key to breaking the relentless spiral of envy, conflict and hatred that enslaves our world.  Reconciliation happens when a transformed vision leads to a new perspective on the past: think of post-war Europe; think of South Africa; think of Northern Ireland.  It can happen anywhere if there is the will to look for reconciliation in our global politics, our divided societies, our personal relationships.  On Saturday morning, we shall observe the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and hold a vigil of prayer here in the Cathedral to remember all the victims of genocide.  It matters that we remember.  But we need to do this in the spirit of Jesus on the cross praying ‘Father forgive'.  That prayer is the basis for our belief that things need not always be like this, for God has a better future in prospect for the world he loves.  ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me' says Jesus at the outset of his mission.  It is the year of the Lord's favour, the time of grace and jubilee.  That changes everything.