6 April 2025 #leftbehindinhope
As we all know from the movie realm, no one… and I mean no one… wants to be left behind. Despite the myriad of films which show a world where a certain subset of people are under oppression from a Beastly Race (animal, mechanical, or formerly human), not a single fictional character claims the world is a better place and human flourishing is at its best. I’m thinking of films like A Quiet Place, Mad Max, I am Legend, or The Matrix trilogy here. The earth is mess and those left behind are, well, struggling for existence. And what does being “left behind” have to do with the readings today?
They are all about it.
Isaiah’s people have been making a new life in exile, under the watchful and cruel eye of the Babylonians. For seventy years they suffer derision, oppression, and religious persecution. Everything about this new way of life is foreign to them and the loss of their former way of life is palpable in everything from worship to identity; they enter the exile as “Israelites who worship at the Temple” and leave as “Jews who worship in synagogues.” Not an enviable position.
St. Paul was a Jewish Pharisee, smarter than most having been intellectually prepared under the tutelage of the highly respected Master-of-the-Law and intellectual giant, Gamaliel himself. In today’s reading, Paul is writing to the Philippians from prison, having left his Jewish roots behind and under the watchful and wary eyes of the Romans. He opens this letter by saying that he has “accepted the loss of all things” and lost it all he has: a prominent Jewish career and his evangelistic nomadic Christian way of life to be sure, but something else worth pondering… a family that never materialized and an abandoned family tree heritage. He’s left everything behind, indeed. Another unenviable position.
And our woman caught in adultery, what has she left behind? Or perhaps, what life circumstances forced her into such and unenviable position? For certain she has been abandoned by her lover to the public embarrassment by the Pharisees. She has, no doubt, been cast off by her family given the rules and social mores of the day. And friends? Probably not the sort who might help her find a foothold and climb out of the place she now finds herself. Unenviable, indeed.
If all these readings are about being left behind and leaving behind a former way of life, is the purpose of Lent ‘where do we go from here’? Because all positions seem rather unenviable, yes?
No. Leaving a life of sin, despite any persecutions or social repercussions is always enviable, for we live in hope, which is nothing more than the promise of the resurrection. We relish in being left-behind because we know that what-is-to-come is eternal life with the Holy Trinity. We accept a certain harsh reality of a Catholic life-lived-out-loud because we hope in the triumphant-sounds-of-heaven. Of the eternal Easter. #leftbehindinhope