Christ Speaks in the Present Tense
Fifth Sunday of Lent
The dictionary says that to be restless is to lack or deny rest to yourself; to be restless is to experience a sense of unease or disquiet in your interior life; and that restlessness is typically characterized by a lack of tranquility in the mind. When we are restless, we worry; we experience anxiety. The experience of restlessness is similar to the experience of dissatisfaction with our lives. We sense that we are missing something important, or we recognize that we desire something, something good, that we lack and the absence of that good fills our hearts with longing, with a yearning, for what we do not yet possess.
My guess is that most of us have experienced restlessness in our lives at one point or another. And for me, the question always arises: Why? From where does the restlessness come? There are many answers that we might give to the question, but the answer that came to my mind goes something like this: We sense that the present moment in our lives is not good enough for us; we want something more than what we have right now. The struggle for us has to do with memory and imagination, with thoughts about the past and the future. Sometimes, we look back toward the past to find a time in life, or in history, when the world was better, or when our lives were better, and discover that the present moment disappoints us. Sometimes, we look toward the future and imagine a world, or a life, that will be better than the life or the world which we know right now. And so, we leverage the past and the future against the present; we place our value in a life that once was, or in a life that will be, and dissatisfaction fills our hearts and minds. We become restless.
I think that when we are young, we tend to focus more on the future. Talk with a student in middle school, and they will tell you that they cannot wait for high school; talk to that same student in high school, and they will tell you that they cannot wait for college; talk to that same student in college, and they will tell you that they cannot wait for a career that gives steady income. So much restlessness of heart and mind. The present moment is rarely enough for us when we are young. We are always so focused on the ‘what comes next’ that we forget the gift that is our present life. As we age, we start to think more and more about the past. “Life was better when I was young,” we tell ourselves, or “the world was a better place in decades past, people still had values, cared about the right things, there was less evil, society wasn’t so crazy,” and then with words like these we start to resent our present lives, our present world. We hold the present against the standard of the past and find it wanting. Our hearts and minds start to yearn for the past, and we become restless.
These struggles with memory and imagination, with the past and the future, define the religious experience of the Israelites in the Old Testament. The restlessness and dissatisfaction with the present moment that we experience in our lives today is found right at the center of the story of salvation history. The people of Israel were seemingly never content with the present moment; their lives were consumed by restlessness and dissatisfaction.
Sometimes, the people of Israel yearned for the past. Moses had set them free from slavery in Egypt, but their newfound freedom did not satisfy their hearts and minds. Lost in the desert and without food, the Israelites hold the present against the past and find it wanting. We hear in The Book of Exodus:
They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us into the wilderness to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Did we not say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone so that we may serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.”
Sometimes, the minds and hearts of the Israelites became consumed with thoughts about a better life, a better world, to come in the future. So many covenants and prophecies given to the people of Israel that talk about a salvation to come, a future reality that will be given to them. God had said to Abraham:
I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.
And God had said to David:
I will make for you a great name, like the name of the great ones of the earth. And I will appoint a place for my people Israel and will plant them, so that they may live in their own place, and be disturbed no more; and evildoers shall afflict them no more, as formerly, from the time that I appointed judges over my people Israel; and I will give you rest from all your enemies. Moreover the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house. When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me.
The hearts and minds of the Israelites were consumed by these kinds of promises about the future, or with memories of the past. You get the sense that for the people of Israel the present moment was some kind of connective tissue binding a past worth remembering to a future worth imagining. The present moment—the world they knew, the lives they lived—served no purpose beyond this work of connecting past and future. Why want to be alive now? Who would desire to live in the present when the past seems so intoxicating and the future seems so full of promise? The minds and hearts of the people of Israel were restless; their lives filled with dissatisfaction.
The reality of Christ changes the narrative of past and present and future. The Gospel of John, with which we have spent these last weeks of Lent, gives to us a Christ who speaks not about the past or the future so much as about the present. In The Gospel of John, the present moment is the only reality that matters.
To the Samaritan women at the well, Christ says: I am he, the one speaking with you.
To the man born blind, Christ says: While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.
To Martha, standing before the tomb of her dead brother, Christ says: I am the resurrection and the life.
Christ speaks in the present tense. And the Gospel of John is a testament to the fact that we live in relationship with Christ now. There is a word we use to describe this reality: abide. “Abide in me, and I in you,” Christ will go on to tell us. He describes a mutual indwelling that defines Christian reality: Christ lives in us and we live in Christ, and this mutual indwelling takes place now, in the present moment.
The words of Christ in The Gospel of John, to my mind, change the conversation about past and future, about memory and imagination, and about the experience of restlessness and dissatisfaction in our lives. The truth of the matter is that we do not live in the past, and we do not live in the future. The only moment in which we live is the present moment, which means that the only time in which we and Christ abide in one another is now; right now. So, it seems to me, that to experience restlessness or dissatisfaction in our lives because of memory and imagination—because we yearn for a life that once was or a life that will be—points toward a problem: either Christ is not enough for us, or we are not abiding in Christ now, and allowing him to abide in us.
St. Augustine said that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. And the promise of Christ is that our hearts can rest in God now. Christ speaks to us in the present tense, and we can do the same: I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.
Homily preached on March 25th/26th, 2023 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
We do not have cognitive and emotional maturation without regression, as to allow regrouping of our mental and emotional brain site chemistry, neurons, and connections for various functions and skills to grow and rearrange in new ways. It is cell division and realignment at the basic cellular level. In children you have stages in which they whine and cannot be comforted, and then emerges a higher level of development and a child appears more mature physically, cognitively, and emotionally. We have cyclical periods of emotional development all of our lives. Each decade seems to bring personal surprises in our perceptions of ourselves and our view of our relationships with others as well as God. For example, in many men there seems to be much maturation occurring between ages 30 and 33, the same ages in which Christ did his ministry. Many men feel like kids in the late 20's, yet feel very mature at age 33 years and have better career directions and concepts of themselves as leaders by age 33 years. During that maturation process, the brain cells are undergoing cell division and rearrangement at the cellular level. Biologically, there can be no maturation without regression, which is felt by a person as anxiety and disquiet.
I learned the above in medical school, psychiatric residency, child psychiatry practice, and as a mother (of 3 sons), and are ideas reinforced in me through personal experience of just getting older.
DL