Our New Year Hope
“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”
Philippians 2:5
Happy New Year! This is the season of resolutions in our secular culture. Most are directed toward self-improvement or goal-setting for the year ahead, but history suggests that resolutions began as a civic or a religious act. The Babylonians were known to celebrate the new year, scheduled in their culture during the crop-planting season in March, by sometimes crowning a new king or reaffirming their loyalty to the existing monarch. They also made promises to their gods to pay off their debts and return items they had borrowed from others. Later in 47 BC, Julius Caesar established January as the first month of the year, aptly named after the Roman god Janus, the two-faced god, who looked both backwards at the previous year while looking ahead into the future. The Romans celebrated the new year by making sacrifices to their gods and making promises to be good people in the year ahead.
While these themes have remained in the wider culture throughout the centuries, these inheritances were likely adopted by the Church because they fit so nicely into our rhythm of reflection, repentance and recommitment. One known incorporation into Christian worship was in 1740 when John Wesley established a service of Covenant Renewal held on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. These services were a combination of scriptures and hymns and served as an alternative for the rowdy celebrations typically experienced on this holiday in the eighteenth century.[1]
How will you go about this day ahead? Will you reflect on the year that has passed and look ahead to the future? Make any resolutions … or at least good intentions?
Let me encourage you to be guided by the quote from Philippians which I included at the top of this meditation. While through it he did not charge us with the impossible, St. Paul did make this exhortation so that we would know what is possible: that our lives of prayer and worship and service to our Lord would and should guide us in becoming more like Christ. Having the mind of Christ would enable us, through the Holy Spirit, to see life differently and be able to act differently as we discern what is of God and what is not. We would find it natural not to just love God but to love our neighbors as ourselves. We would truly be “in Christ,” which Paul speaks about through many of his letters, that “new creation” of which he writes in 2 Corinthians 5:17. We would be Christ’s reconciling agents in this world, a ministry entrusted to us by Him.
Rather than make resolutions we are destined to break, let us instead recommit ourselves to growing in knowing Christ in the year to come.
[1] Sarah Pruitt, “The History of New Year’s Resolutions,” December 19, 2023, The History Channel, https://www.history.com/news/the-history-of-new-years-resolutions. Accessed December 15, 2024.
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