The New Person
1990 (Year A), 15 July /
Pentecost 6
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
Parents discover as their children are born that life is irrevocably changed, sometimes all you have to do is read a book and you’re never the same again. We all see and feel things differently and it’s dangerous to expect the same reaction from you to things which have affected me, but if I could I would make you all read a book called Cancer Ward.
It’s a story of a group of people waiting to die on a ward full of cancer patients in Russia. The hero is a man called Oleg, who, as if his cancer wasn’t bad enough, has been sent to hospital from a kind of concentration camp. Very few people ever get better and leave the hospital, but Oleg is one of them. He leaves it alive only to return to his exile in the camp.
Between these two places he is given a few hours of freedom, and – together with some of the other patients on the ward – he plans what he will do with this precious time. In the end he decides to visit a zoo and seek out an apricot tree in bloom.
These are the words used to describe his departure from the hospital. ‘It was the first morning of creation – who can act rationally on such a day... the world had been given back to Oleg. Go out and live it seemed to say.’ Behind him was the living death on the ward. Before him the death of the camp was waiting, yet here he was looking at an apricot tree in full bloom and thinking, ‘This is the first morning of creation.’
Only a story you say, only a story. Yet what Oleg tasted was that which Bartimaeus, the blind beggar on the road, craved. For a second, both men were one with the divine. The old order had gone, the new order had come, ‘Get up they said he is calling you. He threw off his cloak, jumped up, and came to Jesus. What do you want me to do for you? Jesus asked him. Master, he said, I want my sight back. Jesus said, Go your faith has cured you, and at once his sight was restored.’
Here are two stories about gifts. The gifts of God himself to the creatures he has made. One is in the form of an appreciation of the glory of nature, together with a thankful heart for the recovery of health. The other for the gift of sight. They are moments of divine awareness and as such they are gifts from God. They are points when the mysterious transcendence of God in heaven joins with our everyday world. They are points of recognition of the holiness of all life. And when they happen, the receiver of this gift can never be the same again. Of course we resume our daily round – get bored over work, lose our tempers – on the face of it behave much as before, but we are changed – we have become new people.
When those first Christians discovered that even though Jesus had died he was still present with them, the discovery of his nearness and aliveness brought them to life again and brought God near once more. They became new people with new hopes and new expectations. Moreover what happened to them seemed to be catching. They felt that they had to pass on this experience to others, and when those others heard the story they too were captivated by it. They found a new way of looking at themselves and the world around, and they too were seized with a new hope.
In a word, the story of Jesus, especially of his death and resurrection, told years afterwards to those who had never met him, affected them in exactly the same way as the resurrection had affected the broken and hopeless companions of Jesus at the beginning. The resurrection of Jesus was, and is, still going on, both as a personal encounter with Jesus as Lord, and as a coming-to-life on the part of the hearers.
Our history is filled with examples of men and women being made new. Of communal resurrections. It wasn’t just a transformation of Simon Peter alone with which others went along, but the rebirth of a whole body of men and women in a very short period of time.
And the newness comes not only in overtly religious experiences as Oleg discovered. One of the survivors of the ‘Holocaust’ tells what happened during the first days after liberation. On the first day they walked in the countryside, incapable of feeling any joy. They returned to the camp to eat. ‘One day, a few days later,’ he goes on, ‘I walked through the country past flowering meadows, for miles and miles, towards the market town near the camp... There was no one to be seen; there was nothing but the wide earth and sky and the lark’s jubilation and the freedom of space. I stopped, looked around, and up to the sky – and then I went down on my knees... I know on that day, in that hour, my new life started. Step for Step I progressed, until I again became a human being’.
And what does the Lord require from these new people – well that’s there in the reading as well ‘The Lord has shown us what is good... to do justice, and to love kindness, and walk humbly with your God’. AMEN