The Trouble With Yesterday

(a Steve Orr Bible reflection)

In the film Yesterday, would-be rocker Jack Malik awakens in the hospital after a bad traffic accident. That’s a good thing. But Jack soon discovers he has awakened to a world where he is apparently the only person who remembers the Beatles. 

In an early scene, Jack, still unaware of what has transpired, sings “Yesterday” to some of his friends. They assume it’s his song since they’ve never heard it before. And they are stunned. The song is far better than anything Jack has ever written. They are bowled over by the sense of longing so perfectly conveyed through its lyrics and music. As I watched the scene and listened to him sing, I found I could easily imagine that I, too, was hearing it for the first time: 

“Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.Now it looks as though they're here to stay.Oh, I believe in yesterday.

Suddenly, I'm not half the man I used to be.There's a shadow hanging over me.”

And there it was: a deep, deep desire to somehow turn back the clock, a longing to travel back in time to something and somewhere that could no longer be. 

Would you like to travel to the past?

Time is like a river—or so Einstein thought. He believed it flowed, that it sped up and slowed down. His contemporaries thought time might have banks like a river, that the past was back there, just around a bend. They believed that if someone had great desire to do so, really wanted to go, he or she could travel back the way the "river" had come, back around the bend, so to speak, to the past.

This is the theme tying together several of this week's scriptures. Not time travel, per se, but the almost overwhelming desire to return to the past. This is particularly true of Psalm 137 and the first passage from Lamentations where the writers capture the laments of the Israelites, enslaved by Babylon and exiled far from home.

Of course, the real problem is not years or miles, but rather the distance one has traveled from God. The Israelites mourned for the land of Israel, not fully grasping that the place called Israel was nothing without its relationship to God. That's why they were in exile in the first place: They had drifted away from God and needed time and circumstance to teach them that lesson.

Do you ever feel a sense of melancholy for a time and place in the past? Could it be that what you really desire is a closer relationship with God? The selections from Psalm 137, Lamentations 3, and Habakkuk provide us some relief and point us toward some true solutions for our longing. 

As followers of Jesus, our situation is different from those exiled Israelites. Underscored in the 2 Timothy passage is that the Holy Spirit flows within us, connecting us believers to God in ways we cannot even fully understand. Like a river, it brings spiritual life and nourishment to us. When we feel ourselves drifting from God, we can pray in that Spirit for what we need to fully reconnect us. 

That’s better than Einstein’s river of time. For Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. No time travel needed.

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To fully appreciate the overwhelming sadness of exiled Israelites and their longing to return, listen to this song ("Babylon") from the TV show, Mad Men. The lyrics are borrowed from Psalm 137.

From the movie, Jack Malik sings “Yesterday” 

For you Rat Pack fans, here’s the Frank Sinatra version of “Yesterday”

How Paul McCartney Wrote "Yesterday”