Monday 8 December 2014

Meditation: TIME AND ETERNITY by John de Gruchy

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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