Counting Time
We live, the Bible tells us, in the present—a present open to the promises and potential of a future given by God.
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With only a year and a half to go until the year 2000, appraisals of the past century and predictions about the coming millennium abound. Books, magazines, TV programs and the Internet shower us with warnings and fantasies about the future. The round number 2000 and the change from the one thousands to the two thousands must mean something. Never mind that the “real” beginning of the new millennium is January 1, 2001, and that the beginning of the Christian calendar, the year one—the year of Jesus’ birth—was miscalculated by the sixth-century European monk Dionysius Exiguus so that it occurs four years after Herod the Great’s death in 4 B.C.E. Mistakes don’t matter nearly as much as counting time into significant periods.
All great civilizations count time. Years of existence are measured with a calendar pegged to a significant event. The Greeks began with the first Olympic Games and the Romans with the founding of their home city. The Islamic world begins with Mohammed’s escape from Mecca to Medina, and the Jewish calendar with God’s creation of the world 5,758 years ago, as calculated by ancient scholars. Calendars are subdivided into significant periods by significant events, such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence in the United States, Bastille Day in France and the defeat of enemies in numerous countries. Families make their own calendars by observing yearly anniversaries of births, marriages and deaths. College graduates celebrate the 25th and 50th anniversaries of their graduation. The United States celebrated its 200th anniversary in 1976, Jerusalem recently celebrated its 3,000th year as the capital of Israel, and Bologna celebrated the 900th year of its university. The Bible recites the generations of humans from Adam to Jesus, and Israel’s cycles of prosperity and disaster under God.
Though our histories, genealogies and calendars beguile us into thinking that events march forth in orderly rows, in fact, we create these orderly arrays of historical events. We experience millions of things as they happen. Only when we pick out the most important events and link them in time do we make sense of them. What caused the Vietnam War? What is happening to family values? Where will our exploding technology lead us? We worry and wish we could influence or control our uncertain future. We have questions and we want answers. Counting time helps us find these answers. The advent of the year 2000 symbolizes all this and more.
Time fascinates us. In this century, science has uncovered the physical forces that formed our universe 15 to 20 billion years ago, and the Hubble Space Telescope has looked back in time almost to the beginning. (Several hundred galaxies of the early universe appear in the deepest view of the universe ever taken, at left.) While these billions of years may intimidate us and leave us confused, the more manageable historical periods of our nations and family generations give us hope for the future. In a sense, calendars teach us that life goes on.
The Bible counts time too, but differently. It asks what God is up to in time and why things have gone wrong and how they might go right. In the Creation and the Exodus, in the call of Abraham and the coming of Jesus, in the ups and downs of Israel, in the prophetic oracles and the apocalyptic visions, the Bible testifies to the significance of time, or better yet, to the impact of God’s actions on humans in time. The Israelites looked forward to peace as a people in their own land. The prophets anticipated the “day of the Lord” when God would preserve Israel from its hostile neighbors. Jews and early Christians in late antiquity hoped for divine intervention that would sweep away evil and establish God’s faithful people in God’s kingdom.
The nature of God’s intervention and rule (kingdom) varies in the Bible because the biblical authors had to imagine the future on the basis of God’s past action. In the Book of Daniel, God simply has the fourth most terrifying beast executed and 051burned and then establishes a heavenly, human-like figure as the ruler of his kingdom. In the Book of Revelation, the rider of the white horse (a Christ figure) leads God’s army against the army of evil, defeats the armies, imprisons the devil and rules for a thousand years. After a thousand years the devil is released and leads another army until the army is destroyed by fire from heaven and the devil thrown into a lake of fire and sulphur. Finally, a new city of Jerusalem descends from heaven to earth and the good live there with God forever. These are imaginatively powerful and emotionally palpable hopes that Christians and Jews cherished for centuries in one form or another.
Many Jews and Christians still count time today in the biblical manner. Traditional Jewish belief affirms that someday the Messiah will come to save Israel from evil enemies, and many Christians await the second coming of Jesus Christ to judge the world and save the just. Even those Jews and Christians who do not take the biblical apocalyptic scenarios literally still count time in the biblical manner.
Jewish and Christian apocalyptic books warn against calculating the end of time or anticipating the end by rejecting life now under God.
The many and varied imaginative scenarios of God’s coming—the war between the just and the wicked, the judgment of good and evil with its reward and punishment—attest to the intensity of our hopes and the obscurity of our vision. Periods of weeks and years, millennia and months cannot substitute for hardy endurance of pain along with our pleasures. Urgent prayers for relief and serene contemplation of God’s trustworthiness and wisdom must reach consummation in a gritty perseverance appropriate to an often hostile world.
In the end, when we finish counting, imagining, evaluating and longing for a better future, we find ourselves in the present. Our time is now; our time includes the past we have experienced and learned and the future we imagine and desire. Counting time brings our lives and our reality together, whether for hope or despair. If we despair, we count time greedily or angrily, grasping its resources and mourning its disappointments. We scheme and calculate, seeking to control time and ward off its dangers. The Bible urges us to hope: We live in the present, a present open to the promises and potential of the future, a future given to us by God. So let the year 2000 symbolize this hope.
With only a year and a half to go until the year 2000, appraisals of the past century and predictions about the coming millennium abound. Books, magazines, TV programs and the Internet shower us with warnings and fantasies about the future. The round number 2000 and the change from the one thousands to the two thousands must mean something. Never mind that the “real” beginning of the new millennium is January 1, 2001, and that the beginning of the Christian calendar, the year one—the year of Jesus’ birth—was miscalculated by the sixth-century European monk Dionysius Exiguus so that it […]
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