Fulfilled time

It is a pretty commonplace observation, but perhaps one that strikes home in this season, that the more years you have under your belt, the faster they seem to accumulate.  How can it be the new year again, already?  I'd barely got used to 2023, and there it is, in the rear view mirror.  All so fast.  Increasingly it is hard to pinpoint memories in time - what year was that exactly?  The annual celebrations merge into one, and come around more quickly than seems possible - remember how long it took to get to Christmas when you were a child?  And of course, there is the awareness that in all likelihood there is more road behind than there is ahead...

I find the liturgical year a comfort in the face of the rapid slipping by of the years.  Yes, this Christmas celebration looked a lot like the last one; yes, Easter will roll around very rapidly.  But the point is that at these key points I am taught to look for the Lord Jesus in time, and in fact to see time not as the empty road flashing by, but as full of Christ.

The great mystery of the Christian faith is that time was inhabited, for 33 years or so, by eternity.  The eternal Son of God lived a succession of human years, one after the other.  The full life of God was lived not only in eternity, but in time.  The love of the Father and the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit took place in human history as well as from eternity past to eternity future.  There was a time, two millennia back, when eternity was also, and without any loss, now.  And in the exaltation of Christ to the right hand of God, time was in a sense gathered up into eternity.

The recurring celebrations and commemorations of the Christian year keep us in touch with the fact that time and eternity are thus related: that by entering our time, the Son of God has sanctified it, healed it, lifted it up into the eternal life of God.  All time is about Christ.  It always was - time before him awaited him - and it always will be - in him time has found its meaning.  The successive years exist in relation to those years, those years in which Jesus walked amongst us.  And because he is alive now, those years are not just distant history: he is with us, our time has been claimed for him, for our relationship with him.

Time slips by, but it isn't lost.  Jesus is Lord of time.  Yesterday, today, forever: he is the same.  The rolling years can't separate us from him as we celebrate him in faith.  And one day those years will give way to the eternal day of glorious sight.