Jeremiah 31:7-14
Into a new year
We hold the memories of our past very precariously. There are things that we need to remember, and there are things for which, as Nietzsche had said, we need to practice “active forgetfulness”. “Active forgetfulness” is the capacity to forget intentionally, so as to erase, or at least to cover over, the scars which repeated remembering would only turn back into open wounds.
The passage from Jeremiah takes us back to the time of the Exile, six centuries before the birth of Christ. When Israel had lost its land, its king, its Temple, and its leading citizens carried away to live in Babylonian detention camps. Their glorious past as God’s “Chosen People” was but a faded memory, their present was enshrouded in gloom, and their future seemed foreclosed.
There are times when, we too, can’t look back. Times when we have failed others, ourselves, and God. O, we have our ways of coping. We too, “actively forget,” that is, we selectively try to forget. And when we can’t forget, we rewrite the past. But somehow, it never really works. We never really erase the past, expunge it from existence, for it often lies hidden in our subconscious.
For most of us, the year just past was a mixture of the bitter and the sweet, the joyful and the sorrowful, things to be remembered & things to be forgotten. But sometimes it’s too painful to remember unfulfilled dreams and broken promises. And most of the time, as hard as we might try, we really cannot selectively forget.
Yet we do not need to drink from the waters of Lethe – the waters of “unforgetting” – for the Good News of Jesus is the reality that our past can be redeemed, because in Christ it has been transformed.
And we can lay claim to the future, for it is secured by the One who has never broken the covenant – God’s steadfast love for us.
