I is for IOU

This is the way the Law works, chronologically speaking. In any given day most of us have more to do than we have time to do it in. We may wish, as we say, "there were more hours in the day." But there aren't. So instead we borrow additional time from the future. A month ago, probably through no fault of yours, you were unable to attend Caleb's parent-teacher interview. So you took out a loan against the future. You borrowed next Tuesday evening. You even wrote it down. Caleb and his teacher and your spouse all notarized the loan. But when next Tuesday arrives and the loan comes due, it is no longer a free evening to be spent at your discretion. In a real sense that evening has already been spent a month ago. We say of prisoners or of the dying that they are living on "borrowed time." But who isn't? For all of us, the future is already time owed, debited time. It has been booked solid. It has all been borrowed long since to hold off creditors yesterday.

The Visit of the Magi from "The Life Of Christ" by Josef Darsane This painting and the one on page one were created by Balinese Christian artists. They (and others) are reproduced on Christmas cards and are available for sale through the Crossings office.

Sure, even the Law can be quite generous in advancing us more time from the future, but only by putting us, its debtors, more and more in arrears to the past. The problem isn't just that "time is too short." Even if it were endless, as for us Christians it is, it would always be borrowed time. We have all the time in the world and then some: "world without end." Thanks to Jesus' resurrection, we do. But that by itself isn't good enough. What is the good of merely adding more tomorrows if those, too, are already earmarked for payments past due. What we need is not only more future but one which is debt-free, not in hock to the past. No matter how many more tomorrows we have coming to us, they have already been signed over to a creditor who says, tapping the table, "Sorry, those tomorrows, remember, are what I have coming to me." Who is "me"? Euphemistically we call it The Law. But remember Whose Law it is.

So when the Word became flesh roughly 2000 years ago, he started running on our time. Those enormous debts we have on our hands, all those tomorrows we already mortgaged yesterday, are now inherited by Jesus Christ as well. As he takes us debtors on as his past, his B.C. -- his Bad Credit! -- his future becomes encumbered and impoverished along with ours.

No wonder the little girl in the back pew held back her second Wow. The fact that someone like us has been living for 2,000 years, that she did find Wow-worthy -- until she learned that that someone is Jesus Christ. Then suddenly a mere two millennia seemed, well, disgraceful, if Christ truly is the Son of God. That started us thinking: by coming when he did, Christ inherited a past, our past, as his B.C.; that past laid its heavy hand on his whole ensuing future, demanding its obligations be paid; by our being his B.C., as woefully we are, our unpaid past causes his downfall.