N is for New Time

I'm betting that the little girl did not give up on the second Wow altogether. Remember, the child had asked why Jesus Christ, being just as old as God, being God, would still have a birthday like one of us. I'm not sure her mother answered the Why head-on. But I do have it on good authority that what the mother does reply, simply, is this: "Aren't you glad he did?" Luther did not minimize that this condescension on God's part was humiliating. For God it definitely is, but for us too. Indeed, it is mortifying. Yet just think how God's humiliation simultaneously exalts us.

What is it that drives the new Wow-sayers? Answer: it is Christ's bringing about a New Time, actually a whole new kind of time. It isn't just that he adopts our Old Time, under the Law, as our co-debtor. That is a misreading of "Immanuel," if all Christ does is assure us he is here feeling our pain. That still leaves the bills unpaid and our future as indebted to the past as it ever was, except that now we may have a new celebrity sharing our insolvency, and maybe an endless resurrection in which to prolong it. Really, that is just the same old B.C.-kind of time, only more of it, and now in more respectable company.

But the God of Scripture whom we confess does not settle for such old potatoes, being much more pragmatic, more results-oriented, more innovative than that. True, by becoming incarnate, a creature of time, this God does start running on our Old Time and is run by it -- all the way into the grave. But by the time he is finished, he has put an end to that kind of time altogether, along with all its pauperizing works and ways. And he has replaced it not only with a new heaven and a new earth but also with a New Aeon -- call it a New Time -- complete with a new future and a new past. The new past is when Christ uncoupled the future from all old debts and instead launched a future which is debt-free, a future not of "got-to" but of "get-to." When Emerson says, "Be not the slave of your own past," I can re-interpret his advice much more radically than he ever intended: Yes, not the slave of my own past, but of Christ's. For he came not to destroy the past or to demean it but to liberate and "save" it. He came to save time along with everything else he had created. What's more, that is not only his time but ours, too. And already we have been running on it, he and we together, for some 2000 years now.

We said that Christ put an end to the old kind of time, the kind where the past mortgages the future. On his cross he did that, when he paid with his life, paid off all the mortifying IOUs of B.C. "It is finished," the Old Time is. All the perennial sighs of "A mother's work is never finished" and of fathers' "I'm never caught up" came to an end in Christ's consummatum est. There finally we do get caught up. Of course, that Old Time would have come to an end anyway, sooner or later, with or without Christ. For everyone it will, also for you and me. Whether or not we ever catch up, the past will eventually catch up with us. In due time all the obligations of B.C. will finally come due. Then there will be no more extending our payment period into the future. Time's up. But if that is going to happen anyway -- The Final Judgment, The Last Analysis, the end of time as we know it -- what was the point in Jesus' putting an end to the Old Time when he did, already 2000 years ago? Couldn't he wait? If this dreadful Endtime is still to come, regardless, why rush it?