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By Jason Heron, OblSB
Time is weird.
The planet is spinning like a top, and it’s orbiting the sun, and we’ve devised ways of measuring all that movement. Our calendars and clocks are incredible achievements. But as with most of our achievements, there’s a shadow side. Because we can think carefully about the past, and because we can measure it, we can be filled with regret over mistakes we’ve made, we can be distracted by nostalgia for utopias that never existed, and we can turn our calendars into records of all the ways people have wronged us so far. And that’s just history.
The present is its own strange reality. Our perception of it changes all the time. When you’re saying goodbye to a friend, you can’t get a grip on the present moment; it slips right through your fingers. But when you’re waiting for biopsy results, the present presses down on you and won’t let go.
The future is even trickier. There seems to be ample evidence that tomorrow, next month and next year will unfold predictably. But we all know stories that render that evidence useless. One day you have a headache, and the next you find out you have six months to live. Next year is unpredictable enough, but what about the ultimate future? We know we will die; it’s a certainty. But what then? Humans have been obsessed with this question for millennia.
So, time is weird.
But Christians love it anyway. We love it because it is not just a measurement of our movement around the sun. Instead, it is the venue in which we encountered our incarnate Lord. Along with space, time is the great theater in which we discover the unfathomable One who loved this universe into being and is drawing all things home to that love. So, time and space are gifts through which we encounter the love of Christ, donated completely to us at every second in every place.
Christians love the past because it’s where our faith comes from. The Apostles encountered Jesus 2,000 years ago, and ever since then, as the earth has continued to shuttle us through space, their experience has introduced humanity to the One we must learn to trust. The past is also where our personal faith comes from. When I look back at what
I have received and how the Lord has been faithful to me, I discover that the Apostles’ experience is mine as well. My past is their past, and all of this history has been a gift.
Christians love the present on account of this history. The present moment is an opportunity for me to encounter Christ here and now. My memory of the Lord’s fidelity to my ancestors and to me is the lens through which I view what is happening right now. Because the Lord loved Peter the way he did, I expect him to love me, right here, today, in much the same way.
And Christians love the future. But this remains the trickiest part. Since we don’t know what is going to happen, how can we say we love it? I have met people who are so uncertain about the future that they are paralyzed by it. I have even met devout Christians who are afraid to die. Yet, throughout the New Testament, the Apostles make it clear that Christians are supposed to look forward into the unknown with great confidence and joy. In other words, Christians are supposed to be known for their abiding hope.
This stubborn insistence on living with hope is part of what makes us seem like fools to our non-Christian neighbors. In the ancient world, Christian hope stood in stark contrast to the myth of Sisyphus. He offended the gods, and his punishment was to spend the afterlife rolling a heavy boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, repeating the ordeal for eternity. Without hope, this is what each human life—and the story of our species—can feel like: a heavy, pointless job that never ends.
In our own day here in the U.S., our view of the future might not seem quite as dismal as Sisyphus’. But look at how much time, energy and money we spend trying to live longer—or at least trying to look like we haven’t aged. We fight desperately against time’s passage because, without hope, the future is simply the place where we lose everything we love.
But Christians look forward with a different posture entirely. We don’t have to cling frantically to the present, and we must not fear the future. All of time and space are the Lord’s, and he has donated them to us for the journey home.
