New Creations

2 Corinthians 5:17

We spend a lot of time in the past. 

We relive past mistakes; we run back through experiences; we dwell on past hurts, regrets, and missteps. We carry around whole backpacks full of  memories. We seek to fix the past in amber. We record what we do in photo streams. We write journals of what was said and done. 

We become fixed in our own history.

As I read the New Testament, and particularly St. Paul, the great architect of Christian theology, the mindset is diametrically opposed to ours. Paul is fixed on the future—he boldly asserts that all that is past is for him garbage. He longs for the new creation. He so rejects the predilection for the past that he equates it with existential suffering—soul deep suffering. He sees all creation groaning as if with labor pains, so hungry is all that is for what is to come.

St. Paul experiences the full power and reality of resurrection.

The real and true impact of Easter is that it ends the tyranny of the past. What is done is not necessarily fixed in stone. There are options even in the face of the most insurmountable consequences, the ultimate expression of this truth being the hopefulness and celebration that informs the core of a Christian funeral—the dead are grieved because we are left alone, not because they are done, finished, the last word having been spoken. Christ lives, they live in Christ.

Overcoming our basic mindset, though, is one of the most monumental tasks we can undertake. 

It is as hard to change one’s mind as it is to move mountains. By this, I do not mean the routine malleability of our choices—we can pore over a menu, changing our mind twenty times as each offering seems more tasty than the last. What I mean is changing one’s outlook—the existential face with which we meet the world. That becomes our Gibraltar. We create this outlook as means by which to control the context of our lives. We build a response to the world that will deal with what assume will happen based on our past experiences. But those very assumptions are where we run into trouble. They blind us to what is actually before us. They lock us in place. They freeze the world into being what we presume it to be rather than leaving it as it is—the creation of God that is still forming, shaping, and becoming what God intends for it to be. 

To find hope, let go.

The past is done. We cannot reenter it. We cannot run back through past encounters, past events, or past conversations. They truly are complete. But what we can do is empty them of their power to control us, keep us, and blind us to the presence of God. 

That was Paul’s most basic point. He, like all of us, felt captured by what he had been, what he had done, and the choice somewhere early on to order his life by a Pharisee’s unquestioning obedience to law and rule. That past locked him in a present where he found himself not only blind to God, but at odds with God! That was most certainly an untenable position! St. Luke tells of Paul’s Damascus Road experience wherein God blinded him, ending his ability to keep walking the path he laid before himself. I would argue that what Paul experienced was no less than resurrection as it is—an end to life as we know it, the beginning of life as God has it. Overwhelmed by resurrection, Paul was forced to recalibrate his entire existence. He had to let go.

His eyes were now fixed on the future.

His stance completely changed, so radically and so completely that folks had a terrible time believing it could be so (reread those stories in Acts of Paul’s first encounters with the Church after he was brought in from the Damascus Road). We also begin to see why Paul had such trouble with St. Peter and those like him who did not accept Christ as a new being, a new creation, and a new order for human life. They wanted the assurance of placing Christ in the stream they already knew—Jesus was a Jew, ergo, his salvation was a Jewish thing, ergo, anyone wanting in needed to become a Jew first. “No!,” screams Paul—resurrection ends the past—all of it. To be in Christ is to be new. To be in Christ means looking forever ahead. To be in Christ is to be free of all that was and all that is. We cannot re-chain anyone to the past. We are raised! Live it!

So he cries to all of us.

Easter is not a remembrance of things done—it is a celebration of things to come. It is freedom from the past. It is celebration of seeing with the eyes of God. It is the wonder and joy of seeing creation spring back into life—becoming, evolving, growing into what God intends for it to be.

We are part of that process. We are the children of God through Christ. 

As the old hymn sings—

The strife is o’er, the battle done…

Live that hope now and always—it is yours! You are the new creation!