The Old and the New

The article this week was written for the parish newsletter in 2016 by Fr Anthony Meredith SJ, who passed into eternity last month. The article was written as a reflection on the new year, but the wording seems appropriate for this period of transition from lockdown to some semblance of normality

THE old year, has left us about a fortnight ago and as we embark on a new year a few reflections seem not out of place. Some of us may have made new year resolutions and so far kept them, others have made them and already sacrificed them on the altar of convenience or weakness or both. A third class may have taken the wiser course and taken no resolutions at all and therefore not broken them.

It is hard for most of us to treat this new year in any importantly different way from the last one. It all seems so much the same and indeed in many ways it is. Life continues, our strengths and weaknesses seem strangely un-altered, the seasons carry on, night follows day as it always has done; the sun rises and sets and all this makes it hard for us to take the thought of newness at all seriously. Like Sir Leicester Deadlock in Bleak House everything seems 'as old as the hills and infinitely more respectable'. Indeed some of us find the prospect of novelty distinctly disturbing.

And this is exactly what makes the arrival of the Word made flesh on our planet so thrilling and challenging at the same time. As a great German once wrote; 'Christ has broken through the ring of the past'. He is so completely novel that the human race has never known what to make of him.

People from the past and more recently have seen him and his teaching as conforming to patterns and ideas which can be discovered in other religions. Even during his life time, although some saw in his teaching something completely novel [see Mark 1, 27] others saw him as repeating teaching they already knew. Even his resurrection was interpreted by the unknown traveller of Luke 24, 27 as all part of an ancient pattern. It all happened, as Saint Paul reminds us at I Corinthians 15, 3 “in accordance with the scriptures”. It wasn't really new at all.

At the heart of the gospel stands the wonderful and amazing personality of Jesus himself, a totally new arrival on the map of history. At the same time perfect God and perfect man and yet clearly only one person. How could this be? How could this unique person embrace in his one being time and eternity, god and man? Here was Jesus of Nazareth, a new arrival, yet at them same time “as old as the hills” and much older. He embraces in himself creation and the creator, time and eternity, old and new at the same time. He is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. [cf. Apocalypse 1, 8] Come let us adore him.

 Fr Anthony Meredith, SJ

12th April 1936 - 25th June 2020

+ Resquiecat in pace