12th Sunday v2 2021
Job 38:1, 8-11; 2 Cor 5:14-17; Mark 4:35-41
“For anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation”. I always associate that phrase “a new creation”, not only with St. Paul, but also with the late Fr. Herbert McCabe OP, the famous Dominican writer and theologian, who suffered at the hands of the religious authorities in the late 1960s, but who emerged triumphant with both his faith and his sense of humour intact.
I was actually pondering whether
it was that experience which focused his attention on the new creation, as his reinstatement may have felt like a new birth, and “The New Creation” was the title of a conference which he delivered at Fisher House, the Cambridge chaplaincy, in the spring of 1971, “conference” being Cambridge-speak for a long homily. Delving a little further, however, I discovered that his book entitled “The New Creation”, which I bought later on the basis of that conference, was written in 1963, long before these events, so that theory bites the dust. Never mind!
We do well to ask what the term means. Perhaps it has taken on a new dimension in the context of the green agenda promoted by Pope Benedict XVI, and developed by Pope Francis, notably in his encyclical Laudato si. We must look with new eyes on the created world: we must recognise it as gift, beautiful and fragile, for which we have responsibility.
It is that, but it is also much more than that. GK Chesterton’s explanation comes to mind, of why he became a Catholic. In his Autobiography, Chesterton wrote: “The first essential answer is...to get rid of my sins.” He went on to say that, when a Catholic emerges from Confession, “He may be grey and gouty, but he is only five minutes old”.
To become a new creation is to allow God to re-form us, re-fashion us, so that we see the world, and life, with new eyes. We no longer view our lives as “one damn thing after another” as someone expressed it, or as the same “damn thing” constantly recurring like a perpetual Groundhog Day, which may be one of the temptations of old age, as someone is obliged by physical limitations to accept a restricted routine. Rather, we recognise the presence of Christ in every situation, finding Him more fully both in His silent presence in our own depths, and in the people and situations which we encounter. “Christ plays in ten thousand places” wrote the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, “lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not His”, whilst William Blake encouraged us “to see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour”.
Nor is it only creation that we view with different eyes: it is also Christ Himself. “Even if we did once know Christ in the flesh” says St. Paul, “that is not how we know Him now”. This was an experience through which the Twelve and all the disciples had to pass.
Despite all that Our Lord had done, and all that He had taught, the disciples struggling to make headway in the boat still saw Him very much in the flesh; they still could not comprehend His true nature. Of course it is important to recognise the full humanity of Jesus, and His total identification with us, but to be “in Christ”, we need to recognise the divinity too.
“Who can this be?” ask the tempest-tossed disciples. Not until His resurrection and ascension, and His gift of the Holy Spirit, would they have an answer to that question, would they become fully a new creation. It is a question that we too must answer. We can easily quote Peter’s response, inspired by the Father and delivered at Caesarea Philippi, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” but, until we make that answer our own, by opening our lives to the Trinity who long to dwell within us, we will fall short of our vocation to be a new creation.
