To Be What We Are Not

To come to be what you are not, you must go by a way in which you are not. St. John of the Cross

This insightful observation recalls Jesus’ statement that new wine cannot be put into old wineskins (Luke 5:37-38). When Jesus said this he was responding to a question about why his disciples did not fast and pray like the disciples of John and the Pharisees (Luke 5:33). His assertion was that the old cannot hold the new. A new approach was needed because he was leading his disciples in a new spiritual way of life.

But with this wine and wineskins metaphor Jesus is talking about more than spiritual practices like prayer and fasting. The fundamental principle is similar to the familiar saying that “insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result”. If we know we need to be transformed, so we are no longer fleshly but spiritual, to put off the old man in favor of the new, and need to be born again, then obviously we will have to take a path that is different, untried, and unfamiliar to us. The old way cannot lead us somewhere new.

Perhaps the most crucial area in which we must embrace a new approach, though it may not be where we actually begin, is with respect to our understanding of God. Was this not at the heart of what Jesus was doing?

This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. John 17:3

Jesus saw that the people of his day did not really know God, and therefore were not enjoying his eternal life. His work was to reveal the Father (John 1:18) since the way we view God shapes the life we subsequently pursue.

Could Jesus get people to strive to be poor in spirit, meek, pure in heart, to be peacemakers, to be those who would care about the poor and oppressed, to refrain from judging and instead forgive seventy times seven, and to bless those who persecute them, if the Pharisees and chief priests were controlling how people thought about God? Obviously not. In the terms used by St. John of the Cross, the people could not “be what they were not” unless they would “go in a way in which they were not”.

The second part of his statement can be understood first, and most obviously, as indicating that we must enter a new way different from the road we are currently following. We are what we are because of the path we are on. To be “what we are not” requires going by a way “in which we are not”.

But a second and more subtle way to read his statement is that “the way in which we are not” is the path in which we ourselves are nothing. In other words, we must follow a way in which we cease to be who we are. This is dying to ourselves, losing our lives, and in humility letting go of all we have been. We will then be the ones who “are not” so that God may recreate us to be as he wills.

We naturally seek the familiar, though clearly more of the same will not transform us. For those of us who were raised and have lived by faith in Jesus and in the environs of the church, this is a most difficult challenge. We are like those of Jesus’ day who retorted that they had Abraham as their father and had never been slaves to anyone (John 8:33). So many who thought of themselves as righteous did not want to be “what they were not”, yet those derisively called “sinners” were willing. These strugglers quickly realized that they needed to follow a way “in which they were not”. Likewise, we must be prepared not to defend our spirituality as it is, but to seek to be other than we are, by following a way that is both unfamiliar and which requires being willing to lose ourselves.