Time Enough, and World
Nigerians have a saying left from the time of the British colonial days: “The English all had watches, but they never had time.”
Being challenged by time afflicts many. Who has not heard someone say, “I don’t have time,” or “I am running late,” or “I never have enough time?” Recently, we encountered our pastor’s wife rushing into church, as she announced breathlessly, “I’m almost late.” But “almost late” is the same moment as “exactly on time.” It is likely that God has a few chuckles watching humans chasing the hands of the clock on its twice daily rotation around the dial, like a puppy chasing its tail. It is perhaps not surprising that many people sign up for self-help seminars to learn “time management.”
What does the management of time look like from a Christian perspective? The God-created world doesn’t do time the way humans have structured it. Humans, for example, have structured sunrise and sunset into “time zones,” most of them precisely an hour different from the neighboring time zone. But sunrise and sunset are a littledifferent both in every place and on every day. And from crops to trees to flowers, nature produces its wonders much more casually, without worrying about being “late,” or missing a deadline of a fixed date when everything should be ready for harvest.
Thus, learn from nature that God’s time is not the same as our concept of time. The New Testament writers took advantage of the Greek language using two words for time in order to at least partly express this. One is “chronos,” meaning the kind of time that marches around the dial in precisely measured moments. The other is “kairos,” time which is like natural time, and moves in seasons of maturity and ripeness rather than in digital uniformity.
This plays out in many ways for us. We age chronologically, and can calculate exactly how many years, months, days and minutes have gone by since we were born. Yet, like apples, what is important for people is not how many hours or months, but how much we are maturing or ripening. Aging without maturing yields only an old fool, or sour apple. Our life in Christ leads us through seasons, not time slots.
We are born into chronos. In baptism, we are born again into kairos. In chronos, our capacity to sin is limited only by the hours in the day. In kairos, we die to sin and begin a new life in which we can start a pilgrimage into maturity, away from sin. Our life takes on a meaning beyond simple survival through a long series of days and years until an end point. Maturation replaces accumulation as the goal, as we “put on Christ” instead of affluence, as our focal point or North Star (see Galatians 3:27).
As we celebrate Easter season, we focus especially on our baptism, when we “put on Christ.” The Easter festival begins with baptism. Historically, it was the time considered especially appropriate for baptisms. In the modern era, while we have fewer baptisms, the Easter Vigil still leads us on a review of our own baptismal transformation into the Body of Christ, risen from the baptismal waters as he has risen to new life.
There is a need to correct a misconception that this is for future reference. In viewing time as a linear march until our physical death, the Resurrection becomes relevant only at that moment. But consider instead, “all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life” (Romans 6:3-4). Note that Paul does not use the future tense at all, only past and present. Resurrection begins for us when we pass through the baptismal waters.
The death that matters is our death to sin. It happened the day of our baptism, although we certainly can remember and celebrate the occasion every Easter Vigil, with gratitude.
Once you are born as a human, you will always be a human. In the same way, once you are baptized, you are always marked indelibly as a chosen child of the Father. But being born as a human is not the end of the story. We are not created as a static display, but rather as a dynamic process, and we continue to change significantly over time. Likewise, being baptized, you die to the death-grip of sin. But you nevertheless are not automatically free from sin.
This is where kairos comes in. The trajectory of spiritual maturing is one of many seasons, some more fruitful than others. It follows no specified time line, and indeed can be arrested or reversed. Baptism is a concrete commitment of God to love you infallibly, but not to force you. The progress of your maturing can therefore be thwarted by your will, if that is your choice. Yet for those who welcome the sun and rain of God’s nurturing upon them, who form themselves as the good soil in which God’s gracious seed can be embedded, kairos gives the gift of time as a season of grace and love in which to grow. “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your heart on things above,” (Colossians 3:1, one of the epistle readings for Easter Day). Note, again, that Paul uses the past tense to refer to you already having been raised with Christ.
It is important to realize that time as chronos is part of the created order, and will pass away. Eternity is not an endless line of days, continuing forever. John reports this in Revelation (22:5), that night no longer exists, nor the sun. Instead, the light of God makes sun and lamps superfluous. We are transported to a realm without time or space.
As we grow towards that experience, in the risen Body of Christ, we live in seasons of kairos, in the Paschal joy of our ever ripening times. Time management? “For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. …Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience….And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity” (Col. 3:3-4, 12, 14).
Because, you know, it was time for the Lord to act, and Christ is risen, he is risen indeed.
“The risen life is meaningful now, or it is not meaningful at all. The risen Lord is here and now – in the struggle, in the loss, in the grieving, in the delighting, in people sharing their lives with each other.” — Father Greg Boyle, S.J.