There is an old military wisdom that appears in different ages of history. An army lands on hostile ground. The soldiers are tired. Fear spreads. Some are already thinking not about victory, but about escape. Then the order comes: destroy the ships. Hernán Cortés is the most famous example. Xiang Yu used the same hard wisdom long before him. Later tradition tells a similar story about Tariq ibn Ziyad, and many retellings connect the idea to Alexander the Great as well. Burn them. Sink them. Break the way back. In one moment, the men understand: the shore behind them is no longer theirs. There will be no quiet return to what felt safe. The only road left is forward.

That image touches something deep in us, because this is how many of us live before God. We say we want change. We ask God to heal a fear, remove a burden, calm an anxiety, solve a problem. But usually we want only that one thing changed. We still want the old self, the old habits, the old way of seeing life, waiting safely behind us. We want relief, but not remaking. We want comfort, but not a new beginning. And so we keep circling the same struggles. We keep returning to the same disappointments, the same worries, the same wounds. 

Then on New Sunday the Gospel speaks with greater depth. John does not begin with Bethlehem. He does not begin with the birth of Christ. He begins before history, before time, before all things: “In the beginning was the Word.” Why does he begin there? Because Christ did not come to improve the old life little by little. He came to begin life again at its root. He came with light, life, grace, and truth. He came not to place a bandage over the soul, but to make all things new.

That is why this Gospel can make us uncomfortable before it fills us with joy. A true beginning always asks something of us. It asks us to let go of what is familiar. It asks us to stop keeping a secret road back to the old life. The ships that carry us back to old fears, old sins, old patterns, old identities cannot remain waiting at the shore forever.

New Sunday tells us that we are not prisoners of who we have been. God is not only fixing one part of life. He is opening a new reality in Christ. Faith begins when we stop asking Him to make the old life easier and trust Him enough to walk into the new one.