An Experience of Newness

	Father Roger Vermalen Karban

The readings for Sunday, February 23, 2003, the Seventh Sunday of the Year, are Isaiah 43:18-19, 21-22, 24b-25, II Corinthians 1:18-22, Mark 2:1-12.

Those who can’t distinguish between religion and faith will find it difficult to understand today’s readings. Though all three authors live their faith in the context of a specific religion, none of them limits his or her experience of God to the practice of that religion.

As an organized structure of rules, regulations and rituals, religion can be a great security. Among other things, it teaches us how to respond to much of what happens in life, assuring us that we’re not the first people to have faced such situations. It supplies us with examples of countless ancestors who endured parallel trials, reminding us how these holy people called on God who helped them work their way through those difficult times.

But there’s also a downside to religion. As comforting as it is, it can never guarantee that, one day, we’re going to encounter someone or something no one encountered before. It’s precisely in such unprecedented circumstances that our faith supersedes our religion.
That’s why the theme of today’s readings must be the first lines of our Deutero-Isaiah passage. “Thus says Yahweh: Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not; see, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”

Deutero-Isaiah is addressing people whose faith in God is limited by their Jewish religion. They can only picture Yahweh working in their present lives in the same way Yahweh worked in the past. They want to believe God can get them out of the Babylonian Exile just as God got them out of their Egyptian slavery seven hundred years before. But this isn’t Egypt, Yahweh’s no longer into plagues, there’s no Red Sea to cross and they can’t find anyone named Moses to lead them. The events they commemorate every year at Passover don’t exactly parallel the events they’re facing now. The prophet must pull his people beyond the religious boundaries which are restricting their faith. He’s preparing them for the “new,” for things they’ve never seen or heard before.

An experience of newness is also part of Paul’s message. Accused by some in Corinth of speaking out of both sides of his mouth, he defends himself in our second reading by stressing his oneness with Jesus: the eternal “yes.” “For the son of God, Jesus Christ,” he writes, “who was proclaimed to you by us ... was not ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ but ‘yes’ has been in him.”

He goes on to say that the risen Jesus is the “yes” to everything God has ever promised. This means that we “other Christs” (anointed by God, like Jesus) are constantly called upon to say “yes” to whatever God is doing in our lives; a “yes” that no one who has gone before us has ever been called upon to proclaim in exactly the same way.

Notice in today’s Gospel pericope how the faith of the four men who let the paralytic down through the roof prompts Jesus to say and do something their religion hadn’t prepared them for. “Child,” he announces, “your sins are forgiven.”

His assurance creates instant controversy. “He’s blaspheming,” the scribes proclaim. “Who but God alone can forgive sins?”

Mark first proves Jesus can validly go beyond one’s religious expectations by having him cure the man’s paralysis. Then he reminds his Gospel audience how unexpected Jesus’ words and actions are by describing the crowd’s reaction: “They were all astounded and glorified God, saying, ‘We have never seen anything like this.’”

How come we today rarely “see anything like this?” Maybe one reason has something to do with the fact that a religion originally intended to help us discover and build faith experiences of God in our lives has actually replaced those experiences.