Doing a New Thing

Texts: Isaiah 43:18-25; 2 Corinthians 1:18-22; Mark 2:1-12

Today we in the Church stand on the brink of Lent – Ash Wednesday is this week.  And as I started to ponder this it occurred to me that the whole world is also standing on the brink of a Lenten Season.  Lent is a time to pause, to take stock, to acknowledge our failures, our weaknesses, our need to confess our faults, to seek forgiveness, and to prepare for a fresh start.  Lent is a time to let go of the past and prepare to embrace the future.  Lent is a time to look to God, the source of hope, who has promised to make all things new.  Lent is a time of self-restraint, of sombre reflection on the direction of our life.

How much the world needs its own Lent this year!  How many people in the banking and financial industries around the world need to pause, to reflect, to acknowledge their wrongdoings, their greed, and, in many cases, their criminality!  How many of them need to reflect on the direction their lives have been taking in recent times as they have chased after the mighty dollar to the exclusion of all other considerations.  How many people in regulatory agencies and Governments around the world turned a blind eye, and perhaps sought to enrich themselves, instead of blowing a loud whistle and calling a halt to the insanity of it all.  Now they face, we all face, a Lenten period of self-restraint and sombre reflection.

Of course, not all the culprits are ready to confess, and who can blame them?  In the world there is no assurance of forgiveness.  Confess your sins in this world and the likelihood is a claim for millions will be brought against you.  We say we just want the truth – we want to know what went wrong so that we can learn from it and do better the next time, avoid making the same mistakes again.  But meantime the cries grow louder for heads to roll, for someone (anyone) to take responsibility, and we wonder why the real culprits are so reluctant to confess.  Besides, who among us can cast the first stone?  Certainly not the heavily indebted who now blame the banks for making credit too easy.  The greed of the bankers can only be satisfied through the greed of their customers.

All of which is a very sad commentary on unredeemed human nature.  But we in the Church have a great advantage over the world in this regard.  It's not that we are any better than anyone else – we share the same human nature, after all – it's that we are forgiven.  We know that we are forgiven.  We are assured of our forgiveness.  That is the promise that we have as we enter our own Season of Lent – that is the lamp that guides us through this dark period of reflection and confession.  Without it we would be lost in the depths of despair.  We would be without hope.  We would face a future that is simply a repetition of the past.  There would be no hope of anything better.

That is the best our economists can offer today.  The most optimistic thing I have heard any economist say recently is that we have survived recessions in the past, we will survive this one, and we will survive the ones to come in the future.  In other words, our future will be like our past; a period of foolhardy greed and inflationary bubbles, followed by a recession; an endless cycle without any real hope of changing things permanently and for the better.

That's not the biblical vision, as Isaiah makes very clear.  Listen to these wonderful words from this morning's lesson: Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.  See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?  I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wastelands.  Things do not have to go on being like this: a new approach is possible.  I don't want to sound like an advocate for the National Party but I do think their election slogan – "Towards a Better Future" – was well chosen.  We need hope.  We need to feel that we can and will do better.  History tells us that it will not come from political leadership, however skilled and well-intentioned it might be; but the yearning for it is deep in our hearts, and the promises of God are addressed to it.

According to Isaiah there are three elements to this hope for a better future.  First, it is God's doing.  It is God who is doing a new thing, and we will see a wonderful illustration of that when we get to the gospel passage shortly.  God is the initiator of our new future: our part in all this is to see what God is doing and respond.  The second element deals with the nature of our response.  In Jewish terms we need to make offerings and sacrifices to God, not so as to win his favour or secure our forgiveness, or anything like that, but out of sheer gratitude to God for all that he has already done.  And the third element is precisely that – God has already forgiven us.  In Isaiah's words, God blots out our transgressions and remembers our sins no more.  That is why we can forget the past – our former things – and look with confidence to the future.

St Paul is once again on the defensive this morning.  One of the delights of reading his Corinthian correspondence is the puzzle of working out from what he is saying what someone else must have said to him.  Here it is fairly straightforward.  He has promised to come to Corinth to speak to the believers there face to face twice, both on the way to Macedonia and on the way back, but something must have prevented him from going there.  It seems that someone has now complained that he is flighty, saying one thing and doing the other.

He responds as only Paul can.  He insists that his "Yes" means Yes"; but no sooner has he written this than he forgets his personal feelings and turns the whole thing into another wonderful opportunity for theological teaching.  Christ, says St Paul, is "Yes" to all God's promises.  How he got there from his starting-point doesn't matter to Paul, and it shouldn't matter to us.  All that matters is that in Christ God fulfils all his promises to us.  In Christ, the promise we hear through Isaiah this morning is fulfilled.  In Christ, God is doing a new thing; can we not perceive it?

All this is wonderfully illustrated in St Mark's account of the healing of the paralytic man.  Again, we would miss the point if we concentrated on the man's physical healing, as Jesus' own words make clear.  This is a resurrection story if ever there was one.  Let me briefly summarise the action as you try to visualise it.  Some men are carrying this guy on a stretcher between them.  They reach a particular place; there they dig a hole and lower the man down into it.  Now let's pause there.  What does this remind us of so far?  Surely it reminds us of a burial, a graveside interment?  Pall-bearers carry the casket to a particular place where a hole has been dug, and the casket is lowered into the hole until it reaches the bottom.

When this guy reaches the bottom he is met by Jesus, who says two things to him.  First, he tells the man that his sins are forgiven.  Then, following protest from the self-appointed guardians of the past, Jesus says, okay, then, get up and walk.  First, there is judgment; the man is acquitted and set free – his sins are forgiven.  Isaiah would say his transgressions are blotted out, and his sins remembered no more.  Then he is told to stand up again, which (as I never tire of saying) is the original meaning of the word "resurrection".  Judgment and resurrection – it's all there in this perfectly told story.

But we haven't quite finished.  St Mark wants us to note the reaction of the crowd to all this.  This amazed everyone and they praised God, saying, "We have never seen anything like this!"  Again, the echoes from Isaiah are clear.  They didn't praise Jesus, as we might have expected, they praised God.  And how were these people described in Isaiah's passage?  The people whom I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise.  And what were these people saying?  We have never seen anything like this.  God was doing a new thing and they were having trouble perceiving it!

So as we in the Church enter our Season of Lent, let us do so humbly and thankfully, aware of our need for forgiveness and equally aware that we have been forgiven.  And let us then offer ourselves as a living sacrifice to God to work and pray for the future that is God's will for all, including those who have brought the world to the brink of financial and economic collapse.