Time to Stand Still
Any discussion about time has the potential to end in groaning before its begun. Motion, frames of motion, the before and after of motion, real and imaginary succession . . . it quickly becomes clear that we are like children making up our own language when we talk about time. And so, perhaps the best thing we can do is to talk around time.
I was in my early 30s when I first realized that I was now playing the part of my own father in my memory. The images of a man . . . a preacher . . . standing in the kitchen, waiting for the tea water to boil, addressing his children’s questions before heading back into his study to sit over his Bible. I was now this man in someone else’s film. All the moments and images I had collected had been of someone other than me filling this role and yet there I was, leaving the kitchen with another cup of tea. I looked at my children, wondering if there was a way in which I was looking at something of myself. Of course there was, but how? I see my father, aged and changed from my childhood snapshots. Who is he playing now? There are many ways in which I am my father; but I’m not a monist. We are not one. There are many ways in which I’m not my father at all.
It’s not that distinction is an illusion. There is no deception taking place when I understand myself to not ontologically be the same person as my father. It must be, rather, that the shared universality of humanness is harder to define. My experience “as” my father is both analogous and apophatic. What allows this to take place is the incarnational reality that I am made both from my father’s information and in distinction from it. We can see this complexity in the oneness and the twoness of the biology. I am one man’s son, but I am also the son of two parents.
If we think about time in light of incarnation, we can see both something of what it is and something of what it isn’t. It is real in the same way that the material is real. But it is imaginative in the same way that signs are imaginative. A sign points beyond itself, with itself, to something that is not itself. Time is the incarnation of eternity. God builds this concept into creation with His liturgical ordering of time. We engage time and, in light of its work as a sign, we engage eternity.
Listen to Alexander Schmemann on the sabbatical shift from Saturday to Sunday:
Sunday therefore was not a "sacred" day to be "observed" apart from all other days and opposed to them. It did not interrupt time with a "timeless" mystical ecstasy. It was not a "break" in an otherwise meaningless sequence of days and nights. By remaining one of the ordinary days, and yet by revealing itself through the Eucharist as the eighth and first day, it gave all days their true meaning. It made the time of this world a time of the end, and it made it also the time of the beginning.
We could immediately think of our own two day weekend capturing something of this, unbeknownst to many of us. The Sabbath being originally on Saturday, Sabbath principles move to Sunday as the Lord’s resurrection becomes the moment out of which our work is now done. With many ceremonial aspects of the Law finding their abrogation in their fulfillment in Christ, the week no longer ends on a note of rest, cessation from work, but it now begins with rest . . . and work issues forth from the rest. Sunday is not the last day of our “week-end”. It is the first day of the week. It is our resting in His work to provide for us what our works could not earn. That is what sets our work into a proper motion. It’s why the Israelites were not allowed to gather manna for themselves on the Sabbath. The Gospel requires that we trust in God’s work to sustain us. Manna is actually the body of Christ. Apart from Him, no one is saved.
Since the fall of man, time has become an ailing house for eternity. But, even so, Scripture teaches us that the presence of a corruptible body, apophatically, signifies the coming incorruptible one. Eternity being set in our hearts, according to Ecclesiastes 3, is egged on by the recognition of our finiteness. This would only add insult to the injury if we stood condemned, but in Christ we are not crushed by the expanding vastness; rather, we are beckoned into the greater glory. In this sense, the Christian can see time as being sacramental, in a way. It is a visible sign of inward and visible grace.
Time allows us to interact with eternity in slow motion. And so, when engaged as a sign, it should teach us two things about eternity. Firstly, it shows us that, as Hobbes said, eternity may very well be something like a present tense “standing still”. Secondly, in all its grandeur, it shows us how glorious an event is the incarnation of the Word of God. The creation of time, if we are permitted to think of it as an incarnating of eternity, must needs be analogous to one event . . . the condescension of the Son of God. Eternity is like a giant, cosmic mastiff. In time, the Creator makes it to sit down and allow His children to pull on its ears and rub its belly. We handle that which we know not of . . . this domesticity of the eternal is an act of creative humility. Moments are not only precious but they are fearfully and wonderfully made. In light of this, boredom is not just a sin, but it is bordering on heresy.
Peter Leithart says, “The gospel alters and redeems time. God enters time so that through time, He saves and glorifies the world. Because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, time isn’t progress toward death. Death is swallowed up by life. Time moves toward resurrection.”
We are allowed, because of the Gospel, to experience time from an eternal aspect, making impressions that will remain on the earth. From where we stand, creation either has significance or an immeasurable amount of insignificance. Praise God that the incarnation of the Son of Man removes all doubt as to which it is. His death and resurrection declares that our movements on earth and our daily service and labor are not in vain. Sit, walk, and stand to His glory.
