WHO ARE YOU?
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
March 11, 2019
There’s been
a commercial running on TV for a few years now that I have found kind of weird
and mildly irritating. It’s for a
company that will take your DNA sample and test it and then report back to you
just exactly who you are. There are a
few different versions of this ad, but they all feature testimonials from
people who thought that they belonged to one ethnic group but who actually are
attached to a different one. And so the
man who thought he was German but actually is Scottish traded in his lederhosen
for a kilt, and the woman who thought she was Irish but is actually Native
American Indian now no longer eats corned beef and cabbage but rather wild
rice. All this because the DNA company has
re-defined their identity for them, for a modest fee.
Of course
there’s nothing wrong with coming to know and understand your cultural history,
or for helping other people to discover theirs. But it’s that bit about how a person lives as the result of having that
information that seems so strange. I’d
like to hope that nobody actually alters their way of being in the world as the
result of the DNA tests provided them by the company. Those people in the TV ads seem to say that
because a person is part of this tribe he or she needs to behave in this way,
as distinct from all others. (And by the
way, I have wondered, what if all that alleged DNA testing is a complete fraud
and my results claim to tell me that I’m Dutch? I wouldn’t know, and I hope I wouldn’t go out and buy wooden shoes as
the result of that report.)
This may
threaten to become silly, but in real life it is dead serious. Because all of us are regularly informed that
if we are part of a specific subgroup of humanity then we must live our lives
in certain ways. Perhaps the most
obvious example is in politics. Just
think of all of the powerful voices that try to tell us all the time what a
“real American” believes and does. Or
how a “real Catholic” has to think and behave. Or what any true and loyal Democrat/Republican must say? Or even worse, think of how often we are told
what “all Muslims” are alleged to believe, or all Mexican, or all Jews of all
immigrants.
Before we
presume to know who and how everybody else is, we had better be very sure to
know who we are, and how we are to be in this world. And that identity does not come from any DNA
test or any specific ethnic or cultural or religious or national
attachment. Not if we are Catholic. It comes from the gospel of Jesus Christ and
from our deep history of being in relationship with God. Our
Sacred Scripture readings for this first weekend of Lent demand that we
remember who we are as followers of the Lord. The book of Deuteronomy recalls that our religious devotion does not
spring from a philosophy book or a catechism. It is rooted in a deep memory of what has happened to us, to our
ancestors, through the ages of history, and still today. Remember Abraham, remember Egypt, remember
hard labor and slavery, remember rescue, remember the gift of the Promised
Land. Remember who you are.
The gospel
of Luke is even more explicit about it. All of those familiar great three temptations of Jesus by the devil were
basically the temptation to forget who he was. He had just been told in the previous chapter by the voice from heaven
at his baptism—“You are my son! On you
my favor rests.” And now along comes
Satan to propose that that wasn’t really true—that Jesus needed somehow to
render an account of himself to the father of lies, rather than to God alone.
In all three
temptations Jesus was being invited to do something just because the devil
requested it. Turn the stones to
bread. Worship me. Throw yourself down. At the bottom of it all was the demand:
“Listen to me. Take me seriously as your
authority and do what I demand.” Jesus
knew exactly who he was, and so even though this exchange seems at first to be
a battle over who can out-quote Sacred Scripture against the other, it’s really
quite a bit more simple than that: i.e. Does the devil have a standing to tell
Jesus who he is and to whom he belongs—or not? That’s the very same question
that every one of us faces all the time even today. To whom or to what do we hand over the
authority to tell us who we are? To DNA
tests? To our friends/family? To our political party? To our physical appetites? To our government? To our pastors or bishops? To the media? To science/technology?
We know who
we are because of the one who made us, who has saved us, and who abides in us
always. It is God whom we worship here,
and nothing/nobody else. Those nothings
and nobody’s will never cease trying to convince us otherwise—and that is the
true heart of temptation. It is why it
is so necessary for us to be here, together, in this holy season, around this
altar, to know just exactly who we are.
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