Gospel: Luke 20:27-38
Today I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about time. Given the content of today’s reading from Luke, you may find this a rather unexpected path to go down. But let’s look at what we have here. First, Jesus is approached by members of the Sadducees, a group responsible for the care of the Temple in Jerusalem and who denied the possibility of resurrection and focused solely on the law. Then, we have a question about the law as it relates to remarriage when a childless husband dies. Finally, the question from those who deny the resurrection turns to that very topic.
There’s a lot to unpack in these verses, both with the question asked of Jesus and the way he responds. But there was a line in one commentary that stood out and shaped my approach: “The boundaries of earthly time shape our capacity to make meaning of our experience.”[1]
The boundaries of earthly time.
Consider the nearly limitless ways our lives are shaped – and even bound – by time: what we do and when we do it, and the decisions we make about activities. What time does it start? How long will it take? What time do we need to be there? How long must we stay? So much of our life is taken up by consideration of time. We’re driven by schedules and calendars. Clocks keep us moving, but they also restrict us. When time is involved, there doesn’t ever seem to truly be freedom.
In returning to today’s reading, the Sadducees are asking Jesus a temporal question and looking at things through the lens of a particular time while he is listening with ears and a mind and heart from outside of time. Even as he lived in earthly time, Jesus – the incarnate aspect of the Holy Trinity – was timeless.
It’s been my experience that there are moments in life when time seems irrelevant. The births of our two children were instances when everything other than what was taking place in front of me seemed to stop moving. During the two services in 2017 in which I was ordained, first as a deacon and then as a priest, I felt as if time stopped when the bishop laid his hands on my head. In my ministry and my personal life, in moments when I’ve sat with someone whose life is drawing to a close, our time together seemed to be marked less by the hands of the clock and more by stillness and individual breaths – mine and theirs.
I can imagine many events in the Scriptures having a similar feel, moments when time seemingly stood still. Moses seeing the flame in a bush that was burning but not consuming. Elijah finding God in the sheer stillness while waiting at the mouth of a cave. The sudden appearance of the archangel before Mary. The first cry of the child born in the darkness of the night, and the last breath of the man dying on the cross in the darkness of the day. The women finding a stone rolled away from an empty tomb on the morning of resurrection, and the disciples seeing their Messiah disappear from view at the moment of ascension. In fact, take the Bible and allow it to fall open to just about any page, and I’d wager you’ll find at least one passage or scene in which time seems to stop.
So how do we put words to something so incredible? What do we say? I turned to some of the early Church Fathers to see what they wrote, and what I found was beautiful. There are for instance the words of Tertullian, a late-second and early-third century Christian writer from Carthage, who said, “Eternity has no time. It is itself all time.”[2] We have the fourth century bishop Gregory of Nazianzus, who wrote, “God always was and always is, and always will be; or rather, God always Is.”[3] Then we have St. Augustine, who wrote,”[I]n eternity there is nothing past as if it had ceased to be, nor future as if it were not yet, but present only, since whatever is eternal, always is”[4] and “[A]ll, both past and future, is created and issues from that which is always present.”[5]
God exists outside of time and knows no time. Jesus stepped out of time into this world and returned at the ascension to a realm of timelessness. For them, as Augustine said, there was no past or future, for all existed in the eternal present. So is it possible for us to live in that way, to live as if all things are in the present?
I believe it is. I believe it’s possible for us to live only in the moment – to look for Jesus or the actions of God not in some future time, but at work now. In a world driven by time, I’ll be the first to say it won’t be easy. It takes practice to narrow our view from what’s past and what’s future into what’s present – what’s in the here and now. We do so through the practice of prayer. We do so through the effort of pausing to give thanks. We do so through stopping and simply breathing, simply being. We do so, in the words of Augustine, by recognizing that despite all that’s happening, all that has happened, and all that will happen, every moment is “always present.”
I’ll conclude with a quote from the late-17th and early-18th century poet Alexander Pope, one that I first read several years ago and still lingers with me. To me it’s beautiful language on the holiness and sacredness of time, and of time standing still. As he wrote,
Then say not man’s imperfect, Heav’n in fault;
Say rather, man’s as perfect as he ought:
His knowledge measur’d to his state and place,
His time a moment, and a point his space.
If to be perfect in a certain sphere,
What matter, soon or late, or here or there?
The blest today is as completely so,
As who began a thousand years ago.[6]
Amen.
[1] John E. Senior, “Luke 20:27-40 – Theological Perspective.” Feasting on the Gospels: Luke, Vol. 2 (Kindle edition).
[2] Tertullian, Against Marcion, Book I, Chapter 8. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/03121.htm
[3] Gregory Nazianzen, Second Easter Oration, III. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/310245.htm
[4] St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms. https://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/ted_hildebrandt/otesources/19-psalms/text/books/augustine-psalms/augustine-psalms.pdf
[5] St. Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, Chapter 11. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110111.htm
[6] Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man: Epistle I.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44899/an-essay-on-man-epistle-i