by Matthew Gaetano

Isaiah 43 provides the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures for the Fifth Sunday of Lent in several Christian communions. As a student of history, the section from vv. 18-19 is quite arresting:

Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.

“Remember not”! In the New American Bible, God says to his people that they should not remember “the events of the past.” Well, it seems as if I’m in the wrong profession.

I’m mostly joking; of course, the Scripture is full of the call to remember God’s words and acts (Deut. 16:12, Ps. 42:6-7, Isaiah 46:8-9). But there is a danger of a certain sort of unhealthy conservatism or traditionalism in our outlook on the faith. TRF has been dedicated to recovery and ressourcement, dialogue about our shared past, a looking back to failures of proper understanding, a reflection on what is handed down to us by our ancestors, particularly within the Augustinian tradition. And this is a good thing. But the theologian and the Christian, including one who is a historian, must wrestle with a God who does “something new.” In Revelation 21:5, the one who is seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new”–just before the enthroned one asked John the Revelator to “write this down.” Paul says in 2 Cor. 5:17 that one in Christ is “a new creation”; “the old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” And another reading in the lectionary for today has Paul saying to the Philippians (3:13-14) that he is “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead.” Paul “press[es] on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

In The Comforter, the Russian theologian, Sergei Bulgakov (d. 1944), seeks to clarify the danger of the form of traditionalism that does not look to the eschaton alongside that of the revolutionary ethos that has no interest whatsoever in the past:

On the one hand there is luciferian individualism, which in its extreme rebellion strives to separate itself from … forebears; and on the other hand there is the sleepy and depersonalizing conservatism …; and both of them oppose, in their one-sidedness, the image of God in man, in which the day of personal consciousness is indissolubly united with the night of the maternal womb. (339)

As I reflected on this passage from Isaiah, I stumbled upon a few passages from the past (!) that may be of interest (with some adjustments to punctuation, etc., throughout):

In the Jewish Jerusalem Talmud, we have the following:

Ben Zoma said: “There will be a future time when Israel will no longer mention the Exodus. What is the reason? … And so it says [Is. 43:18-19)]: ‘Do not remember the first things’; this means the Egyptians. ‘And what was earlier do not dwell on’; this means the Kingdoms. ‘Behold, I create something new, now it will grow’; this refers to Gog. They gave a simile: to what can this be compared? To someone who encountered a wolf and was saved from it. He started telling about the wolf when he encountered a lion and was saved from it. He forgot about the wolf and started telling about the lion. After that, he encountered a snake and was saved from it. He forgot about both of them and started telling about the snake. So it is with Israel; the last troubles make them forget the earlier ones.”

The contrast between what is forgotten and what is remembered is understood as the difference between the “forgotten” secondary thing and the new thing that becomes primary. The Talmud speaks about the way in which the name Israel is remembered as what is new in contrast with the old or secondary (“forgotten”) name of Jacob.

The great medieval French Rabbi, Shlomo Yitzchaki (d. 1105), or Rashi, does not move from trouble to trouble, from wolf to snake; rather, he understands this passage as turning the attention of God’s people from the story of liberation from Egypt which is “forgotten” because they are now involved in praise and even redemption.

These miracles that I mention to you, that I performed in Egypt, do not remember them from now on, for you shall be engaged in this redemption, to thank and to praise.

Irenaeus (d. c. 202), the early Church Father, addressed this passage in the context of his conflict with the Gnostics. He saw the “new thing” as the work of Christ, but of course he sought to show the unity of the two testaments against his opponents who rejected the Old Testament:

And those of them who declare that God would make a new covenant (Jeremiah 31:31-32) with men, not such as that which He made with the fathers at Mount Horeb, and would give to men a new heart and a new spirit (Ezekiel 36:26), and again, “And remember not the things of old: behold, I make new things which shall now arise, and you shall know it; and I will make a way in the desert, and rivers in a dry land, to give drink to my chosen people, my people whom I have acquired, that they may show forth my praise” (Isaiah 43:19-21)— plainly announced that liberty which distinguishes the new covenant, and the new wine which is put into new bottles (Matthew 9:17), [that is], the faith which is in Christ, by which He has proclaimed the way of righteousness sprung up in the desert, and the streams of the Holy Spirit in a dry land, to give water to the elect people of God, whom He has acquired, that they might show forth His praise, but not that they might blaspheme Him who made these things, that is, God. (Against Heresies (bk. 4, ch. 33)

Irenaeus highlights that there is one God working in His Word and His Spirit, through a lineage of prophets, “although He has [but] now been manifested to us”–indeed, only now has He “been poured out upon us after a new fashion in these last times.” The new thing of the Gospel must not lead to the heretical rejection of God’s deeds throughout history–something that Irenaeus condemns in Marcion and other heretics.

Centuries later, Franz Delitzsch (d. 1890), a German Lutheran theologian who spent much of his career at the University of Leipzig, offered his remarks on this passage. Delitzsch had deep Hebrew learning and experienced some of the important and challenging nineteenth-century innovations in interpreting the Scriptures and Isaiah in particular. He nonetheless maintained a high view of divine revelation and the truth of Christianity. Regardless of the complexity of his position on the development of the biblical text, this learned commentator offered the following remarks on these key verses, saying that v. 18

does not commend utter forgetfulness and disregard (see ch. 46:9); but that henceforth they are to look forwards rather than backward. The new thing which Jehovah is in the process of working out eclipses the old, and deserves a more undivided and prolonged attention. Of this new thing it is affirmed, “even now it sprouts up,” whereas in ch. 42:9, even in the domain of the future, a distinction was drawn between “the former things” and “new things,” and it could be affirmed of the latter that they were not yet sprouting up. In the passage before us the entire work of God in the new time is called new, and is placed in contrast with the … occurrences of the olden time; so that as the first part of the new thing had already taken place (ch. 42:9), and there was only the last part still to come, it might very well be affirmed of the latter, that it was even now sprouting up. (197)

What is the character of this new thing that is sprouting up–that to which the people of God should give prolonged and “more undivided” attention? Delitzsch speaks of wonders done by Jehovah. He links the redemption of the people of God to nature and the cosmos as a whole (as indicated by the verses in Isaiah 43 after v. 19):

[Jehovah] transforms the pathless, waterless desert, that His chosen one, the people of God, may be able to go through in safety, and without fainting. And the benefits of this miracle of divine grace reach the animal world as well, so that their joyful cries are an unconscious praise of Jehovah. … In this we can recognise the prophet, who … has not only a sympathizing heart for the woes of the human race, but also an open ear for the sighs of creation. He knows that when the sufferings of the people of God shall be brought to an end, the sufferings of creation will also terminate; for humanity is the heart of the universe, and the people of God are the heart of humanity.

Delitzsch draws out the cosmic vision of the prophet–the link between the redemption of Israel, humanity, and all of creation. Creation as a whole is waiting for what has only begun to sprout to come to full growth. In Romans 8, Paul uses the image of all creation groaning in the pains of childbirth–all created things which expect the adoption, redemption, and harvest of what is now only the firstfruits.

More recently, Claus Westermann (d. 2000), confronts this tension between old and new–between forgetting, remembering, and acting: “Israel requires to be shaken out of a faith that has nothing to learn about God’s activity, and therefore nothing to learn about what is possible with him.” A remembering of God’s great deeds in the past is commanded; we must be faithful to that which is handed down to us. But we cannot let our faith become one that “has ceased to be able to expect anything really new from [God]” (quoted in Walter Brueggemann’s challenging work on Isaiah 40-66).

In the conclusion of Truth Is Symphonic by the Swiss Catholic theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar (d. 1988), the problem of old and new is answered with the Incarnation and the celebration of the Eucharist:

All that remains for Christianity … is the present. And this is its great strength. [God] became a man like ourselves. He lived in our alienation and died in our God-forsakenness. He imparted the “fullness of grace and truth” (Jn 1:17) to our here and now. He filled our present with his presence. But since the divine presence embraces all “past” and all “future” in itself, he has opened up to us all the dimensions of time. The Word that became flesh is the “Word in the beginning”; in him we have been “chosen before the foundation of the world.” It is also the “final word,” in which everything in heaven and on earth shall be caught up together: Alpha and Omega.

Only in Christianity can the opposed world views be reconciled. Both of them, the memoria and the spes [hope], are already embraced by the real presence of God in the Eucharist. We gather around the Lord’s table to celebrate the memorial of his Passion, but we do so with a view to his coming (1 Cor. 11:26). But when, in the Christian memoria, we enter through contemplation into God’s great deeds for us, we do not submerge into a timeless realm before the creation of the world in a Buddhist or Platonist sense: we immerse ourselves in the grace of God, which has always been there for us since before all time, and which has embraced us more purposefully than we can ever conceive. So this grace also opens up an unimaginable future ahead of us. Since Paul has grasped that “Jesus Christ has made me his own,” he can speak of “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead” (Phil 3:12ff.) [Recall that this passage is read after Isaiah 43 for the Fifth Sunday of Lent; I honestly didn’t expect Balthasar to comment on this exact passage when I turned to this section of his book!] It is not possession, but a being possessed, that lends wings to Christian hope. It vibrates with the thought that the earth should reply to heaven in the way that heaven has addressed earth. It is not in his own strength that the Christian wants to change the earth, but with the power of grace of him who–transforming all things–committed his whole self for him.

Because the Christian does not have to depend on his own resources to find himself, but has been situated and found by God, he can lose himself neither in the past nor in the future. “All things are yours: the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours; and you are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s” [cf. 1 Cor. 3:21-23]. (190-92)

Memoria and spes – memory and hope – past and future – remembering and acting. As Paul says in Romans 8:23-24, we “groan eagerly” along with the rest of creation for the fullness of redemption. What way of life should such groaning, such eagerness, bring forth in us? On this Fifth Sunday of Lent, let this confidence that God is “doing a new thing” lead us to “strai[n] forward to what lies ahead.” Indeed, this is urgent because, as Paul says in v. 24, “in this hope we were saved.”