Memory And Identity

Third Sunday in Lent 2025

The richness of today’s Scripture readings makes it important for all of us, preacher and congregation, to take time during the week to reflect on the many messages God is sharing with us, His people, as we finish the first half of the Lenten season. If we pay close attention to St. Paul in his historical exhortation to the Corinthians, we will get clues on how to tie the entire bundle of lessons together and make more progress in our journey to the Paschal festivities, our destination.

Paul’s words have been selected from a longer reading. It omits three verses, which specify the very sins that Paul is trying to warn against. We’ll get to that in a moment. Remember the context: Paul is speaking to a congregation that has been baptized in water and the Spirit, a church that has exhibited spiritual gifts like healing and prophecy. So he works from a kind of verbal picture of our spiritual ancestors, the Hebrew people led by Moses out of Egypt, just as God promised to Moses out of the burning bush. A cloud preceded the mob of escapees as they left captivity. Moses raised his staff over the sea and the waters parted, allowing the Hebrews to pass through it. This was a kind of baptism into Moses, a precursor experience to the baptism into Christ experienced in the Paschal vigil by our catechumens in just four weeks. All of them drank from the Rock that Moses opened with prayer and his staff.

But “with most of them God was not pleased.” So none of them entered the land of promise and many of them were overthrown in the desert. Why? The full passage gives us three sins—and if you want some visuals you can watch Charlton Heston in the Ten Commandments. Most of them, even as Moses was receiving the Ten Commandments, worshiped a golden calf. Many of them then got drunk and abused each other, disrespecting their human dignity. The Scriptures say that this caused sickness that took twenty-three thousand lives. And the bulk of the people got sick of the free food—the manna that rained from heaven—and put God to the test by demanding meat. This was part of the grumbling condemned by Paul. Paul’s warning follows: “these things happened to them as a warning, but they were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come. Therefore let any one who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.” Right living and orthodox worship must flow from our baptism into Christ. If we pay more attention to our passions than to the Word of God, we will fail and bear the temporal and eternal consequences. That’s exactly what God does not want for us.

Rather than that, we are blessed with this forty-day period of ongoing conversion. We are invited to deepen our memory of God’s love for His people, going back thousands of years to Abraham and Moses. We should deepen our awareness of what the word “memory” or “memorial” meant in first-century Israel. A memory, like that last week of the covenant cut between God and Abraham, or between the elect people liberated from Egypt and God, or between the Son of God and His people effected through Christ’s passion, death, resurrection and ascension, was not just a story to tell the kids. Every memorial was a re-enactment of the original covenant in the present day and time, and every one of them looked forward—or better, heavenward—to a fulfillment. Every bris with an infant boy was a re-enactment of the original covenant of circumcision with Abraham, a ritual that brought the man or boy into covenant with God and Israel. Every memorial Sunday celebration of Eucharist looks back to the Last Supper and the once-for-all sacrifice on Calvary and looks up to the eternal wedding banquet of the Kingdom.

In the words of a famous Bible scholar, “memory is identity.”

Our story from Luke’s Gospel today sounds a little strange unless we recall what Jesus was doing in chapters 10 through 19. He and His disciples are on pilgrimage—their last Passover journey before Christ’s sacrifice. Many of the stories and parables told in these chapters are found only in Luke. And they are all related to emphasize the need to believe in Jesus, repent of sins and join His community of faith and charitable work.

Someone brings the latest Jerusalem news flash: Pilate had killed some of their fellow Galileans who were at the Temple to offer sacrifices. Another tells the current gossip about a tower in Siloam that collapsed, claiming eighteen lives. But Jesus can’t pass up a chance to remind them of the truth. None of these people died because they were greater sinners than the ones who had survived. That’s something they could learn from Ezekiel, or Job. But without repentance, a life of conversion, anyone is likely to perish. Mortal sin kills the soul, and that death lasts forever. Convert and live.