We look, in other words, back to the cross as the great act of redemption that makes us what we are. But we look forward to the final return of Jesus to complete God’s plan for history.

Mostly, when we think of time in relation to our church meetings, we think of the time at which it meets and its duration, or perhaps the duration of the sermon.

A gathering of Christians is about time. To be Christian is to look at time in a very distinctive way. When we meet together, then, we should be aware of the time: not whether it is 10 am or 5:30pm, and not whether the sermon has yet again exceeded the regular length, but something much more profound than that.

What do I mean?

As human beings we learnt time from the rhythm of the seasons and the hours of the day. We live with several repeated cycles of time, and these enable us to develop communal and individual habits that serve us. We know how to work and to rest (or, we used to); when to put away the cricket whites and put on the football boots; when to plant and when to sow.

That is the great insight of the wonderful passage from Ecclesiastes:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted …

As creatures under the sun we are bound by nature’s timing because we are part of nature ourselves. An agricultural society of course knows this more intimately. One of the striking effects of urban living is the determination of human beings to try to counteract the times of nature: we lighten up the dark sky and and drink coffee and stay awake till the wee hours, we demand food at any time of the year, we aircondition our homes and public spaces to a constant temperature all year round. Technological man wants every day to be the same.

But we are bound in time in another way: we are mortal. Nature’s cycle is like a forward-moving wheel. We cannot stop the growth of our bodies towards death and decay: Frail as summer’s flower we flourish, says the old hymn, blows the wind and we are gone. This is what Isaiah says, too: All flesh is like grass.

And one response to the press of time is to – in the sadly now-ironic words of Robin William’s Mr Keating from Dead Poet’s Society – to ‘seize the day’. You are a long time dead, and death comes sooner than you think. So: enjoy it while it lasts. As the 17^th century poet Andrew Marvell put it (he was seducing a lady at the time!)

Always at my back I hear
Time’s wing’d chariot draws near.

It is no accident that the religions of agricultural societies emphasise the cyclical nature of time. Farming communities are dependent on nature, and nature is not always dependable. You are vulnerable to drought, famine, fire, locusts and flood – and so you pray earnestly to whatever god controls these. The Jewish calendar, and then to some degree the Christian one, recognises this exposure to the vagaries of nature. The key difference was the identity of the God being worshipped – the creator God, the Lord of heaven and earth.

But the Bible is not simply a book about the time of the seasons. It is a different kind of time – namely, history. ‘History’ is the name for time not as repeated seasons, but as successive epochs, eras or centuries. History is measured not by crop yields but by the births and deaths of kings. History is not simply local, but national and global. History asks questions such as ‘who are we as a people?’ and ‘where did we come from?’ And just as it asks about origins, history demands that we inquire about destiny.

Read More