Before and After

A Reflection on the Second Reading for March 31st, 2019:
​Fourth Sunday of Lent

2 Corinthians 5.17-21

Brothers and sisters: If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.

So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake God made Christ to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Christ we might become the righteousness of God.

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B.C. and A.D. versus B.C.E. and C.E. I gather that scholars popularized the terms “Before the Common Era” and “After the Common Era” as a way to avoid referencing the divinity of Jesus evident in the terms “Before Christ” and “Anno Domini.” Although I’m a Christian and believe in Christ’s divinity, over the years I have come to find the secularized reference useful for reasons entirely self-serving. With B.C. and A.D. no longer the only way to refer to timelines, I am free to use these initialisms as I please—and I do. The former refers to my life before Christ and the latter to my life since then.

Truth be told, I have been a Catholic all my life, but I have not always been a follower of Christ. In my “B.C.” life, I attended Mass because my family did, I went to confession because my schoolmates did, and I sang in the choir because my friends did. All of this made me a follower of others, but not a follower of Christ. Difficulty and turning to Christ in the midst of it is what made me His follower, His disciple.

"Difficulty and turning to Christ in the midst of it is what made me His follower, His disciple."

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Suffering gets a bad rap. Personally, I’m grateful for suffering, not because I’m a masochist—I’m not. Still, were it not for suffering, I would have moved through life on my own steam, leaning on those who love me during the rough patches, but generally trusting in my own self to make my way in the world. By the grace of God, that didn’t happen. Instead, I hit a bump so debilitating that I couldn’t return to health on my own. And when I leaned on those who loved me, they simply couldn’t bear the weight. Having no one else, I turned to Christ, who loved me and carried me through it. As He and I travelled along together, I grew to love Him—not because of my family, my friends and my schoolmates but because of who He is and what He did for me.

In the second reading for this Sunday, Saint Paul reminds the Corinthians that each person who follows Christ becomes a new creation. When Christ is born (and borne) in us, it winds down our B.C. era and ushers in a radically new life: the years of our Lord. We receive from Christ a new vision. “We regard no one from a human point of view” (v. 16). Rather than valuing people for their appearance and worldly success, we see them from a spiritual perspective instead. The longer we travel with Christ, the more intimately we know Him and the less we desire our B.C. life.

Saint Paul says, each time we turn away from harmful things, we are reconciled to God. As this turning away becomes habitual, so does the process of our reconciliation to God. This makes our A.D., the years of our Lord, so much better than the darker time before, and it helps us to achieve our heart’s desire, which is to be more like Christ.

​Donna Davis

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