QUARANTINE BLOG # 608

November 28, 2021

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, the time when Christians focus on three things: we remember the birth of our Savior in Bethlehem’s manger, look forward to his Second Coming in power and in glory, and examine our preparations for living in “the time between already and not yet.”

The first Sunday is called Hope.  The scripture text is Matthew 24:36-44.

This devotional is from The Word in the Wind, by Bruce L. Taylor.

“God’s Time in Our Time”

“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Matthew 24:36). So Jesus spoke to his followers concerning the close of the age, impressing upon them the suddenness of its coming, describing God’s searching out those who are preserved and those who are left to their doom, and encouraging the disciples to be prepared and watchful for the coming of the Lord. 

They should not be like the people living in the days before the flood, when all but Noah and his family were so entirely immersed in their ordinary occupations, heedless of the impending deluge, that they were swept away unprepared and unrepentant. Absorbed in the habits of the world, so busy with the routine of their lives, they had no sense of how irrelevant that routine was about to become. Their attention all focused on their own comings and goings, they failed to perceive God’s coming. They could think only of human time, and were unable to see God’s time.

The original language of the New Testament uses two very distinct words to express the idea of time. English has no precise counterparts for them. The Greek word chronos (from which we get our word “chronology”) refers to time in the sense of the clock and the calendar – time that can be measured in minutes and hours and in days and years. Chronos is time as perceived and measured by the daily activity of human affairs, by the rise and fall of kings and empires, by the deposit of the monthly paycheck and the payment of monthly bills, by births and by deaths, by profound sorrows and intense joys.

In contrast, the Greek word kairos is used in the New Testament to mean the appropriate moment; not a measure of hours and days and weeks, but of readiness. Kairos is time as God conceives of it, seeing all of human history unlimited by calendars. It is a King born in a cattle stall and laid in the straw of a manger. It is the return of the same King, once executed for speaking and doing God’s truth but raised from the dead, to consummate his dominion over all creation.

Throughout the history of Christianity, there have been people who insisted that God’s kairos was capable of being measured by human chronos. In spite of Jesus’ declaration that not angels, not even he himself knew the day and hour when God will close history, there have been those who were unwilling to permit the times and places to remain in the knowledge of God alone.

To understand time in the sense of kairos is to move beyond the matters of daily routine, of interpreting life as merely days crossed off a calendar. It is to see that God is concerned with creation in a personal way. 

It is to believe that, in spite of discouragement and disappointment in ourselves and others and in the events around us, God can break into any one of our moments with the experience of eternal life. 

It is to have faith that God can enter into our world, whether it be at home or at work, at school or at leisure, in the town hall or in the voting booth, and hallow the mundane with the possibility of the holy. 

It is to understand that God alone is the one who can and does give enduring peace through his judging and forgiving word, and that God will finally bring history to its culmination.

Sometimes, when life’s perplexities give rise to doubt, it is easy to wonder whether God has not abandoned the creation after all. When a marriage has lost its joy and has dissolved into bitter resentment, when a child seems determined to discard every moral principle that we have tried to instill, when the vigor of our youth has left us and we fear the prospect of a long decline of health, when it seems that no one is listening to our cries of despair, it’s hard to rouse ourselves to expect an advent of God in our lives. But scripture tells us over and over again that it is just at such moments that God is likely to infuse our chronos with divine kairos, to shout or whisper his presence in the humble birth of his own Son or the glorious return of the risen Lord.

The New Testament urges us to be vigilant, always ready for Christ’s advent. We are called to watch for the Lord’s coming, not because we know when it is, but because we know what it means. The truth of God is on its way into our world. The light of God’s promised deliverance is intense enough to break through the darkness of human time; the birth of Christ was its first dawning and his second coming will be the full glow of the mid-day sun. “The night is far gone, the day is near” (Romans 13:12). That is the promise! Thanks be to God!

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