Friday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time
I remember going to Washington, D.C. for the first time. The city is full of memorials and tributes, each of them proclaiming in some way that we should never forget: the soldiers who died, the holocaust victims, the contemporary heroes who have done good deeds. And yet, despite our best intentions, we do (as a culture) forget. The memory becomes little more than a story and we try to impress the importance of remembering the story but often, we fail. The intensity with which I remember September 11th, for example, is not usually matched by my youngest students, who were, after all, 6 and 7 years old when it happened. Very quickly, it will move from being a watershed moment when people remember the country pulling together, to becoming an event mentioned in history books, not really remembered in quite the way that the memorials seem to suggest.
Today’s scriptures speak of almost forgotten events, too, but perhaps these scriptures also tell us something important about the ways we share memories and important events.
Today’s Old Testament lesson (2 Kings 25:1-12) is a reading of great pathos, for it describes the final destruction of what had once been the unified nation of Israel under Kings David and Solomon. The kingdom split into two and was weakened; then the Assyrians overtook the northern kingdom Israel. For about two hundred years after the northern kingdom of Israel fell, the southern kingdom of Judah was the standard bearer for the Jewish faith. God had promised that David would have an everlasting throne and Judah seemed to bear witness to that promise.
Until, that is, the Babylonian Empire came to destroy Judah and succeeded. The emotion and heartbreak in this passage is palpable. The wealthier citizens, those with power and any kind means to maintain a city, are all sent into exile. They walked for five hundred miles to the Babylonian capital. The only ones left behind were those who were poor, those would not be able to replace any kind of kingdom.
Thus today’s psalm is a lament and the words play both on forgetting the holy city of Jerusalem, which was the capital of Judah, and forgetting the Lord. The two kinds of forgetting are linked, because when people remembered Jerusalem, they remembered the promises of God to David and to themselves as a people. The psalm implores people not to forget because in remembering, they remember God.
Finally, in today’s gospel (Matthew 8:1-4), Jesus actually orders the leper he heals to forget him – not to mention that this deed happened, but instead to go to the priest and get certified that he is now a clean man. Obviously, this deed was not totally forgotten by the former leper for it is now a story we read in the Bible. But this story does say something about forgetting and remembering for the right reasons, at the right time. At this particular point in Jesus’ ministry, Jesus does not want these miracles to known, perhaps so that people will focus more on his message. At the right time, however, much is revealed about Jesus.
So too, for us, in our forgetting and remembering. Are we holding on to the right kinds of memories, ones that help us think about God more and more each day?
- Jana M. Bennett