A People Shaping Re-enactment

Where I am reading in Rikki Watts' Isaiah's New Exodus in Mark, Watts is drawing on the work of Jacques Ellul and Paul Ricoeur concerning the formative influence of a community's founding moment upon its 'image of itself to itself'. This self-perception is perpetuated in the community by propagating the energies of the founding moment into the future, most strikingly by ritual re-enactments of the found moment. "Here the community's history is retold, the values, energies, and ideals ... inculcated, and the community re-constituted through succeeding generations."

We see this, of course, in Israel's founding moment, the Exodus, which is re-enacted every year at the Passover, so that it continues to form part of the collective conciousness of the people, even to this day. However, not only is the past retold in this re-enactment, but the hopes for the future are expressed as well. "Next year in Jerusalem" it is said today. But even in Jesus' day, the Passover not only looked back to Yahweh's action in bringing the people up out of bondage in the first Exodus, but also looked forward to the promised New Exodus foretold by Isaiah, in which Yahweh would restore the Kingdom that had been taken away in captivity.

For us, as a community of faith, there are also re-enactments of founding moments that continue to shape us as a people. One is, of course, the Christmas story — just this past Friday night we met to begin to prepare a drama to re-present that founding moment, and have it speak freshly into the hearts and minds of the gathered people of God. We will give a lot of energy to getting this re-enactment just right — practicing until all who participate know exactly what they are doing, and what their part is — so that it may have the shaping and forming effect that is its purpose.

Today we engaged in another re-enactment of a founding moment — when Jesus, just before his sacrificial death, re-told and re-interpretted the Passover story as a different story of New Exodus — a story of a New Exodus deliverance undertaken by himself in an unorthodox and unexpected way; the way of the suffering servant. But unlike the Christmas story, this founding moment is a moment which Jesus himself instructed us to re-enact, to re-tell, so that the community of faith might be re-membered as His Body, as His Bride.

But the odd thing is, when we come to re-enact the institution of the new covenant of faith — our founding moment as a community — we inexplicably seem not to be concerned about preparing, about ensuring that everyone knows the part he or she is expected to play. Rather we tack it on at the end of a service (which we spent hours preparing for in every other way) and simply trust that everything will kind of work out. Even reading Paul's striking words to the church at Corinth about the overwhelming importance of this time doesn't seem to get our attention.

I wonder what is happening here. I wonder what is going on, that the most community shaping drama we could ever re-enact gets so little attention from us. Have we made this time of gathering more about us, and about celebrating our successes, our significance, that we have ceased to feel the need to be shaped by the ultimate suffering servant?

I truly hope and pray this is not true, for if it were it would not speak well for our future as a community of faith.