TIME
AND ETERNITY
Galatians 4:4-7
John 17:1-5
When the fullness of time had come
This is eternal life, that they may
know you, the only true God.
When he was in prison in Nazi Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted some
words that a previous prisoner had written above his cell door: "In one
hundred years everything will be over."
This was his attempt to cope with the frustratingly slow passing of
time. Yes, time can drag on and on, but time
also passes; time is also relative as we now know. But it boggles the mind to be told, as we
were in Sutherland two weeks ago, that in five billion years our planet earth
will disintegrate. Or is it five-hundred
billion years? Or is it light
years? It does not matter, really, as neither we nor our great-great grand children
will be around to witness the event. Our
concepts and measurements of time and history are totally inadequate to help us
grasp the immensity of this cosmic dimension which the Bible calls eternity.
Time has to do with human history, the time we used to track by watching
the sun and stars, but now record in seconds, minutes, hours, days and years. And there will certainly come a time when
history end whether in a bang of whimper we don't knows. By then even Volmoed will have closed its
gates and Bernhard will have retired. But
eternity is quite different. Eternity
cannot be measured according to our calendars and clocks, and is not confined
by our time and space. Time passes, but
eternity always is. Before all things
came into being, before time, eternity already was and ever shall be. When the New Testament speaks of eternal life,
it is not speaking about endless life as we know it according to our time scale;
but to life lived in a totally different dimension. Eternal life is always here and now, always
in time but not subject to time and therefore it cannot be destroyed by the
passing of time. Love endures forever
because while it is experienced and expressed in time, it is eternal. Everything else will pass away, St. Paul tells
us, but love endures forever.
In thinking about the passing of time Bonhoeffer took great comfort from
the words of the Psalmist: "my times are in your hand, O God." (Psalm
31:15) This does not mean that
everything is cast in concrete, foreordained by God before our birth. To believe that is to believe in fate, or trusting
what the stars tell us according to the signs of the zodiac. Sometime soon I will meet a dark stranger who
will fall in love with me, or find a job that I really like, because the stars
tells me this will be so! This is not
much different from what a coach of a Middle Eastern football club said on TV the
other night: "God willing, we will win the game!" Really?
We can play lousy football, but if God wills we will win! Many people
think like that, they believe in fate even though they call fate God. God has it all worked out for us ahead of time
irrespective of what we do -- "whatever will be will be;" " when your number is up, you will get
the bullet;" "he was in the
wrong place at the wrong time" others might add.
But why would God decree before a child is born, indeed, before the
foundation of the earth, that he or she should die in the prime of life, or
marry someone from Bredasdorp, Addis Ababa, or Melbourne, or end up a tramp, movie
star, president, or all four at the same time?
We pray that God's will may be
done, but we know that not everything that happens does so according to God's
will. The prophets of the OT who declared
God's will, were not listened to, so God's will was presumably thwarted. Israel was taken off into captivity and
exile. If everything happened according
to God's will, Israel would not have disobeyed God but instead would have lived
happily ever after in Jerusalem and everything would have been just fine. The fact that nations go to war and millions
get killed is not part of a divine plan; it is the plan of politicians, arms
manufacturers and generals.
To say with the Psalmist that our time is in God's hand neither means
that we should resign ourselves to fate or that there is an immutable divine
plan for our lives which may include dying in a tragic accident at ther hands
of a drunken driver, or getting cancer.
Nor does it mean that God decides when our time is up -- John, today you will be shot dead by a
robber,; Mary, tomorrow you will fall off a ladder and break your neck. God gives us the freedom to choose, to act,
to take this fork in the road rather than that one. Others may take away our freedom, circumstances and accidents might curtail us, old age will creep up on us, but we are not
puppets on a divine string. So what does
it mean to say that our time is in God's hands?
It means that we are enfolded in eternity. That underneath us, supporting us, are the
"everlasting arms," a love that is eternal, to which we commit our
lives.
One of the themes of Advent which began last Sunday is "discerning the times." This does not mean predicting the "times and seasons"
for the second coming of Jesus based on our calendar, as if God keeps a diary
like ours with everything already in it for 2015 and beyond; no, it is about learning to recognise and identify
with what God is redemptively doing in the world. Eternity became incarnate or embodied in time
in the coming of Christ. "When the
fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the
law, in order to redeem" us.
Eternity continually breaks into our time when God's Spirit makes all
things new, establishes justice and peace, brings healing and wholeness to
broken people, and restores relationship.
"Today" Jesus tells the penitent thief, "you will be in
paradise." "Today," Jesus
says to Zacchaeus, "salvation has come to this house." To discern God's time, God's kairos as the NT calls it, the breaking of eternity into today, means to live our lives in alignment
with what God revealed in Jesus is already doing to redeem the world. It means to
live now in in response to God's eternal love which we have come to know in
Jesus. "This is eternal life, that
they may know you, the only true God."
We can't change the past; we can't predict the future, but we can redeem
the time, we can place the limited time given to us, in God's hands, we can
accept eternal life. Consider a gang leader who, because of his life of selling
drugs and violence is in prison. Was it
God's will that he should sell drugs, or even that he should spend years in
prison? Surely not. It was a misuse and abuse of a life that should have been lived
differently. But let us say that in
prison the gang-leader's life is turned around by the love and grace of God,
and let us say that he decides that once he has been released from prison, he
will spend the rest of his life helping youngsters who are trapped in lives of
violence and drugs, he will, redeem the time.
The years that were lost will not be wasted forever. He has begun to live in another dimension,
the dimension of redemptive love. Placing
our time in God's hands is not living in the past or in the future, but living
eternal life now. Today we can choose
eternal life by being open to God's eternal love in Jesus. That is what it means to know God.
John de Gruchy
Volmoed, 6 December, 2014
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