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.

On death and Christmas parties, or How to inhabit time

The office Christmas party - more likely in my experience to be the office meal out - is a standard fixture of December, and often the only occasion when colleagues will socialise together.  I've been out of the office environment for a number of years, and this is one of the things I've really missed.  But this year I've noticed that it doesn't seem to be really happening.  I know people whose 'Christmas' meals have already happened; others who will delay having lunch together until January.  The festive period is just too busy already, perhaps with work or perhaps just with the preparation for Christmas proper.  So the office do gets moved, one direction or the other.

At one level this is just perfectly sensible pragmatism, and it really doesn't matter at all.  But on another level I wonder what it says about the way we view time.  I think we are used to being able to rearrange time around ourselves.  It doesn't suit me for it to be Christmas right now, so I'll move the date.   This picture - the individual sovereign over time - really doesn't sit well with the biblical picture of time at all.

Consider the structure of the biblical account of time.  The first creation account in Genesis 1:1-2:3 is built around the seven days of the week; it is a time focussed account of creation.  (The second, in the rest of chapter 2, is space focussed.  One of the reasons I think it is a mistake to try to harmonise them is the loss of these two crucial perspectives on created life).  Time is given, according to Genesis, by God as the gracious framework for human life.  That time is a gracious gift is underlined by the institution of the Sabbath, a day of holy rest, for worship and the enjoyment of God - not to be filled with the strivings or the pleasures of the individual, but to be entered into as a thing prepared by the Creator.  The Sabbath gift shapes and defines the rest of the week.

This pattern continues through the history of Israel.  The weekly Sabbath, along with the annual festivals, define time as something which relates the history of the nation with God, and therefore as a means of living into the relationship established in that history.  Israel is not to claim mastery over time, but to live in its God-given rhythms.  It is only as part of the covenant curse that the relationship with time becomes fraught and desperate.

This matters for two reasons.  Firstly, in a big picture theological sense, time is the created echo of God's own eternity - his gift to us to allow us, finite beings, to enjoy relationship and being-in-sequence, analagous to his own eternal Being and Trinitarian relationship.  So to inhabit time properly matters.  Time, with its proper structures, is to be received and entered into as a gift, not regarded as a resource to be infinitely manipulated for my convenience.  Time is about knowing God and relating to him.  The church, I think wisely, has followed the example set by the Lord for Israel and related time to salvation history through the calendar of fasts and feasts, and I see that as an important way to reflect this approach to time.  It isn't necessary to do it this way, but it is important to do it some way.

Second, one day you will die.  Time, you see, is not infinitely malleable.  There is a date and a time marked in the calendar - not in your calendar, not on your personal timetable - when the last bit of time (as far as you are concerned, at least) will befall you.  (The only way this will be avoided is if Christ returns first, in which case your last bit of time will be everyone's last bit of time; at least, time as we know it).  Pretended sovereignty over time in the day to day of our lives does not prepare us well for the fact that we will one day hit an appointment we can't shift.  It certainly doesn't prepare us to receive that appointment as coming from the hand of the gracious Lord of our time and all time.

So anyway.  Have your Christmas party as and when, I guess.  But don't kid yourself that you are master of your time.  It is a gift; enter into it with joy, and perhaps then you will leave it when you have to with contentment.

Who was, and is, and is to come

 God describes himself in Revelation as the one who was, and is, and is to come.  There are all sorts of things that could be unpacked out of this (about God's relationship with time, about the nature of eternity, etc.) but I have been thinking this morning about the importance for the Christian life of keeping these three dimensions in mind.

If we forget that God is the one who was, we will tend to lose touch with the objective, once-for-all, foundational works of God.  This is a particular danger in our culture, which lives very much in the present (and perhaps to an extent in the future) but tends to regard the past as dead.  For the Christian, the past lives - because the God who was also is.  Moreover, the past - unlike, in our human experience at least, the present and the future - has a fixed character, a decided shape.  (This is true despite whatever attempts at revisionist historiography we might make; revisionism only appeals because it claims to account for more of the actual shape of things, to incorporate more of the evidence).  As against the subjective moment of the now, and the necessarily somewhat imaginative view of the future, the past is laid down.  It is therefore a solid rock for our faith.

If we neglect that God is the one who is, there is a real danger of a sort of functional deism.  We will live as if God wound up the universe, and perhaps also the church, and then left it to run.  We will tend to forget that Christ is presently reigning, that God is presently active.  Our worship will become all about remembering, rather than receiving.  We will typically not expect much now from God.  We may well neglect prayer, particularly that important prayer in the NT for the giving of the Spirit in greater measure.  We will tend not to pick up on those little signs of the kingdom , the shoots of grace growing in a generally barren world.

If we neglect that God is the one who is to come, it is likely that we will over-invest in the present.  That may look like settled, comfortable, compromised Christianity, which replaces the future hope of the kingdom with a paid off mortgage and foreign holidays.  But it may also look very zealous, a life lived in expectation that the kingdom of God can be ushered in by our efforts, prayers, whatever.  If the former, there is a real danger that - when it comes to the crunch point of realising we cannot serve two masters - we will choose to serve comfort.  If the latter, there is a real danger that we will be disappointed, perhaps disappointed enough to abandon the life of faith.

Is it pressing things too much to align those three great aspects of Christian discipleship - faith, love, and hope - with these three temporal dimensions?  To think of faith based on who God has shown himself to be in the past; of love as driving communion with God in the present; and of hope as reaching out for his future coming?  Of course they don't map on perfectly, but it seems to me there might be something there.

The key thing - and it is perhaps the main point of the biblical use of these descriptions - is that he is the same God.  The God of the past, of creation and of incarnation, is God in the present, and it is the same God we await in the future.  He is himself, perfectly himself, at all times.  He has not changed, nor will he.  Whether we look back, or up, or ahead - there he is.  Great is his faithfulness.

Marking time

As another new year begins, and an old one is laid to rest, I'm thankful for the way the gospel affects my perception of time.  It strikes me as one of the most fundamentally human things to do, this marking the passage of time, but as a purely human activity it tends towards morbidity or naivety.  Each time the new year rolls around, it's a reminder that we have a finite number of these - and we don't know what the number will be.  On the other hand, each new year provides us with another opportunity to con ourselves into believing that this year the world will be different, and we will be different - this will be the year!

But the gospel changes both.  On the one hand, the gospel gives me reason to believe that this whole process of drawing a line under the old year is not completely arbitrary.  Again, it's a fundamentally human thing to do, this dividing time into sections.  Sometimes those sections are dictated by the physical or cultural world around us - the round of seasons, the national holidays.  Sometimes they are decided in retrospect, in the way we tell our life stories, when a particular period seems to us to have a particular significance.  But in one sense it is all arbitrary; time flows on irrespective of how we mentally chop it up.  Nothing perceptibly changes when the clock strikes midnight.  Except that the gospel gives me a framework that makes this division sensible rather than just necessary.  The gospel story tells me that in Jesus time has fundamentally changed; the old has gone and the new has come.  The great turning has already happened in Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.  And so there is something very sensible about drawing a line under 2015.  It has slipped into the past, and because of the death of Jesus can be sensibly considered to be really past - closed, tied off, complete.

On the other hand, looking forward, I don't need naive optimism.  I know that this year will hold many hard things.  I know that I will not be the person I ought to be or want to be in the next twelve months.  I know this.  But I also know that this coming year is not totally formless.  It isn't a blank slate.  The resurrection of Jesus tells me that this coming year is already full - full of him who fills everything in every way.  Neither events on the world stage nor surprises in my personal life will happen without him.  And there is therefore room for realistic hope.  Everything has turned in Christ from old to new, and therefore everything will turn from old to new.

And every new year is a year closer to the time when he will be all in all.

Times and Seasons

As I sort of semi-observe Lent, I've been holding in my mind two themes from the Apostle Paul.  On the one hand, in Galatians, Paul frets over his converts observing "days and months and seasons and years"; he sees it as evidence that they are turning back from their profession of faith in Christ and returning to old pagan ways.  I don't imagine that the Galatians are actually being tempted back into paganism.  Common consensus is that they were just being encouraged to add some Jewish distinctives to their Christian faith.  But for Paul it is all the same.  They are turning back to slavery under the weak and beggarly elements of the world.

On the other hand, in Romans, Paul sees the observance of particular days as a non-issue.  It is indifferent, in so far as it does not become a badge of some superior spirituality.  If seasons are observed in honour of the Lord, fine.  If they are not observed, because of the Lord, great.

Of course, in neither of these cases is Paul thinking of the seasons of the Christian year, which were centuries away from being thought of.  His target is primarily Jewish observance, and some of his anti-observance rhetoric comes from his clear desire to maintain the truth that there is no need for Gentile Christians to become Jews.  But the flexibility in his approach does, I think, point to something deeper.

For Paul, the important change in time and season is not in any annual round of fasts and feasts.  For him there are only two times: this age, and the age to come.  In Christ, the age to come has already invaded this age, and by the Spirit more and more people (even as they live out their lives in this age) are participating in the age to come.  The decisive change in time has already occurred, and is now being applied through Spirit-empowered gospel proclamation.

So long as that central truth about time is not obscured, Paul does not care whether his converts observe yearly festivals.  Perhaps that is a helpful way for us to think.  As human beings, we naturally mark the passage of time.  In some way, we are always going to structure the day, the week, the year.  This is a natural phenomenon.  But it can be pressed into gospel use, in so far as we relate our time - the thoroughly relative and relatively unimportant changes in the passage of time which we are compelled to mark - to the real time, the fulfilled time, the arrival of the age to come in Christ.

If I observe Lent to the Lord, as a way of remembering him, then I am blessed.  If I turn it into a way of acting as if the new day had not dawned, then I am heading back into slavery.

Tempus Fugit

Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and for ever.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning.

Thoughts on my thirty-second birthday:

Our God is always the same, and always new; always both the Ancient of Days and the Bright Morning Star.  Always the One Who Was - never different from his own past.  Always the One Who Is - absolutely himself in the here and now.  Always the One Who Will Be - the promise that tomorrow and in every tomorrow he will be there, newly himself, newly the Same.

I am chained to time, but God is Free.  Time is his servant.  The God of the Bible - the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ - is not timeless.  But he is the Master of time.  He directs it.  I cannot be everything I am in a moment - so much of me is lost in the past, or unknown in the future.  But God is himself, at all times and in all places.  He bears within himself his own past and future, perfectly.  He is the Same.  The newness that meets us each morning in new mercy is the real newness of God, of the God who is always old in his newness and new from ancient days.  Eternal.

Our hope - the hope of the Christian - is not to be rid of time, but to have all our time and our times gathered up and united in his eternity.  To experience Sabbath - sanctified time, the time which is bound to the Lord of Time, the goal and end of all our time and times.

Tick Tock

So, here we are in 2008. I've been thinking a lot about time and the passing of time recently. Amongst other questions, I've been pondering the following:

• is God timeless? (I think I think he isn't exactly).
• what is time for? (I'm pretty sure the answer is the Incarnation).
• how should we think about time? (I guess we should value it as any of God's creations).

But I don't want to talk about any of those right now. Right now, what I'm struck by is that relationships can only happen in time. (This is certainly true of human relationships, and I suspect that with some modification it is true of divine relationship as well, hence my disbelief in God's timelessness). And one of the things about a relationship is that it changes over time - hopefully growing and deepening. So it's a blessing that time is divided up - that we have months, and seasons, and years. Because the dividing points - like the new year just beginning - provide marker posts. Times for us to stop and reflect on the relationship so far, where it's been and where it's going.
In 1 Samuel 7, Israel's relationship with God has just reached a point of growth. The idols have been put away. Israel returns to the Lord. As a result, the Lord defeats the Philistines. Samuel marks this milestone in the relationship by raising a pillar, which he names Ebenezer ("stone of help"), saying "Till now the Lord has helped us". This specific point in time is marked and remembered, as a point when God's people learnt to trust him more fully. (A specific point in space - between Mizpah and Shen - is also involved. Time and space are inextricably linked as between them providing the context within which God relates to his creation).
The beginning of a new year is in itself an Ebenezer - we're still here, still trusting Christ. Thus far, the Lord has helped us. I wonder what other occasions there will be to raise memorials through 2008.