蜜芽传媒

I have just been reading this fascinating book called Forgetfulness by Francis O鈥橤orman. His thesis is that modern life is obsessed with the idea of the future to the detriment of the past. As if every day is a new year鈥檚 day, we are constantly looking ahead of ourselves towards the new, towards innovation and progress. The modern workplace is full of people gassing on about 鈥済oing forward.鈥� Out with the old in with the new.

Though a Christian himself, O鈥橤orman believes that Christianity was originally responsible for this slide towards cultural amnesia. All that stuff about repentance and starting afresh, about being renewed through baptism and being born again. Here, O鈥橤orman insists, is the source of the desire to live permanently in the future, as if in a rolling process of ever repeating New Year鈥檚 resolutions.

But here鈥檚 the thing. In the church鈥檚 official calendar, today is not actually New Year鈥檚 Day. That鈥檚 a secular festival. Today comes eight days after the birth of Jesus - which, according to Jewish law is the day on which male Jewish babies have their circumcision. So in church terms, today is the feast day of the circumcision of Christ.

And this is connected with O鈥橤orman鈥檚 important theme because one of the most historically common forms of Christian forgetfulness has been around the whole subject of its relationship with Judaism. Indeed, Christianity commonly presents itself as a New Testament to Judaism鈥檚 Old Testament, as if the Christian bit replaces the Jewish bit, as a sort of an update. That鈥檚 why the language of the Old and the New Testaments can be both patronizing and misleading.

Because as Jesus鈥� circumcision makes it perfectly clear, this so-called replacement theology has a massive problem: Jesus wasn鈥檛 actually a Christian. He was a temple worshipping, kosher keeping circumcised first century Jew, who loved the book of Isaiah and called God 鈥楢bba鈥�. St Paul may have come to see circumcision as unnecessary for gentile converts, but he certainly didn鈥檛 mean to distance new Christians from God鈥檚 promises as laid out in the Hebrew scriptures.

The feast day of the circumcision of Christ is therefore a day for recognizing the rootedness of the Christian faith in its history, in Judaism. It redirects our attention to where we have come from and reminds us that fundamentally Jews and Christians are cousins. So, in terms of the Christian calendar, the first of January is not all about putting the past behind us with airy and unconvincing promises about the new person we would like to become. I agree with O鈥橤orman 鈥� we should be far more suspicious of all our shiny rhetoric of the new. Today is more about looking back and acknowledging the things that have made us who we are. For therein lies the deeper possibility of a much more meaningful change.

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