A new year with Jesus

I guess for many people the beginning of the year is an exciting time for a fresh start.  The old year, filled as it had inevitably become with disappointments, has passed; the new year stretches ahead, its story as yet unwritten.  Might not this be the year you finally make it at work, or find a spouse, or kick that vexing habit?  It might be, or at least there is nothing written about this year yet to say it won't be.  (Of course we all know that really there is a distressing amount of continuity between the years, and nothing has really changed.  But that is the great virtue of endings, drawing a line across the paper and saying 'now we start afresh'.  Otherwise, what hope?)

For the Christian this turning from the old to the new is the perpetual motion of life.  The old has gone, the new has come - and on this basis we turn (in repentance) from our old selves to be renewed (by faith).  And we do it again and again and again.  New mercy, not just each January, but each day, with every night a chance to practice dying to what we are and every morning an opportunity to have what we will be amended by God's Spirit at work in us.  Always a turning, because we know that in this life we will never have fully and finally turned.  The new self and new life towards which we turn is real, concrete and accomplished in Jesus, but in our experience it is always that towards which we are journeying.

Time is a bit funny for the Christian, or at least the way it works has been redefined.  When we say 'the old has gone', that is not a bit of autobiography, with a date when the old was done away with.  In actual fact, as far as our experience goes, the old is still very much with us.  And when we say 'the new has come', we are not saying that we have turned over a new leaf, or even that a new leaf has been turned over for us.  The 'new' remains, to our experience, something more often than not out of reach.  You cannot show this 'old' and 'new', and the dividing line between them, on a calendar.  Nevertheless, it remains the case that the old really has gone, and belongs always to the fading past, and the new really has come, and constitutes the bright and shining future.  In Jesus Christ, the old humanity has been put to death and buried, and the new has been raised from the grave.  This was a once-for-all movement, a transition from old to new which is definitive for all our time.  Because Jesus in his time passed from old to new, the old has been decisively and forever consigned to the past - even if my calendar future contains so much oldness, so much past-ness!  In Jesus the whole of life is like the new year.

And yet not quite.  One of the attractions of the new year for many is its sheer blank-ness.  It awaits content.  This is not so for the Christian.  Consider Ephesians 2:10:

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do.

Going into the new year, we don't go into empty territory, yet to be shaped, but into the landscape God has prepared for us, stocked with the things which he has providentially readied for us to do.

Now there is a burdensome way to read this, and I think I've often fallen into thinking of it like this: as if the apostle is telling us that God has written a to-do list for us already, before the year has even begun, and we now need to get on with ticking off the jobs he's got for us.  No doubt there are in fact tasks and acts of service which the Lord has prepared for us to undertake, but to focus here is to miss the middle of the verse and to view the new year in abstraction from Christ.  We are 'created in Christ Jesus for good works'.  Jesus Christ remains the determining factor in the new year.  It is not as if we were plucked from death and the power of the devil by God's grace and then sent off to face the new year by works.  It is not as if in Jesus our old sins are removed, the page wiped clean, but we are then left to write the new story ourselves, perhaps with a little divine help.

No, what the apostle is saying is that the resurrection of Jesus means that our time is already fulfilled.  He has accomplished all the good works necessary.  Our role now, going into this new year, is simply to keep close to him, to walk in his footsteps.  And then we will find that the works he has prepared are there waiting for us, not as a to-do list but as the contours of the land in which we walk.  He has not wiped out our past time without preparing for us a future time - and that not an empty wasteland or even a proving ground, but the hill of Zion, which yields a thousand sacred sweets even before we reach the heavenly fields and golden streets.