Thoughts on New Year's Day

Liturgically, New Year's Day is the eighth day of Christmas, and therefore observed (where such things are still observed) as the festival of the Naming and Circumcision of Jesus.  I find that provides rich themes for reflection and contemplation as one year turns over into the next.

For starters, the Lord was given the name 'Jesus' - meaning God Saves - because he would save his people from their sins.  This invites two lines of reflection.  First at the level of salvation history, the coming of Jesus is the faithfulness of God to his covenant people.  The stories which accompany the presentation of Christ at the temple reflect the longing of faithful Israelites for the promised salvation of God.  Simeon sees in this child God's salvation, the rescue and therefore the glory of Israel, the revelation to the world of God's good purposes to and through his chosen people.  Anna speaks of the redemption of Jerusalem, no longer as a distant hope but as a present reality.  It is good at the beginning of a new year to be reminded that God's faithfulness to his purposes and his people runs like a golden thread through each and every year, even when that thread is sometimes hidden from view.  His faithfulness to Israel meant the forgiveness of Israel's sins; and that faithfulness is ongoing.

And then at the personal level, how good it is when reflecting on the last year, with all its many sins and failings, to be reminded that Jesus is God's salvation.  He is the one who is able to deliver us from our sins and the consequences of our sins - and he will deliver us.  That is his very name.

There is also the circumcision, which perhaps seems obscure but to my mind conjures up similar reflections.  Circumcision was the sign of the ancient covenant with Israel, and so when Jesus is circumcised we see God's faithfulness to a promise made to Abraham hundred of years before.  We are reminded again of his constancy through the turning years.  But then again, the circumcision of Jesus is not just the continuation of that covenant, but its fulfilment - in him, the covenant sign becomes a present reality, or perhaps we ought to say that he is the reality which always lay under the covenant sign and gave it life and power.  His circumcision is God's faithfulness to the old, but just as that faithfulness it is also the putting off of every old thing, so that it points to Christ's cross, on which the old man is put to death - not for Christ, but for us, who are circumcised in him.  In Christ, the old is really old and done away with, and the new year can open with a sense of real newness, just as every day is a day of fresh mercy and therefore new creation.

The years go on.  Jesus is the same - yesterday, today, and forever.  Always the one who saved his people from their sins, and will save his people.  Always the one who kept faith, and made us faithful in him.  Always the one who decides and judges what is really old and has to go, and always the one who brings in the genuinely new.

Happy new year!

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.

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.