| Time shuddderrrs
Time shudders slightly in mild regrets; it shudders significantly within crises by which the punctuation of time becomes apparent through sudden discontinuity within the usual rhythm of our lives. Time shudders explicitly with the event of death. Time is punctuated with a decisive, irreversible now and then experience—one is dead, another is living, one is gone, others remain. Time shudders, although we do not usually notice this shudder. Time shudders with separation; death makes this explicit. Exposed to the reality of death, our experience of time’s rhythm is retarded to a massive and irreversible punctuation that is characteristic of all time with its silent shudder between now and then. v The gospel image of one being taken and the other left may seem difficult to integrate into our horizon of life, yet this is always occurring. We are separated by death in the midst of life; life is always out of sync as one is taken and another is left. The strange gospel image compresses mortal leave-taking into a singular moment of separation. Whether leave-taking occurs over days, weeks or months in terms of the divide between life and death, it is finally minute as a moment in the occurrence of time. Death discloses the reality of time experienced between humans, whatever the quantity of time lived in its anticipation. The gospel image is accurate as a future reality because it is also a present reality; the shudder of time becomes explicit with the reality of death as the experience of separation from another. In biblical apocalypse, there is always more not less in any image, yet what is anticipated is already occurring in some measure. In every instance of one taken and another left, we are exposed to our mortal limits and what is wholly other than life. Death brings us as close to this exposure as any experience in human life. We live within a horizon of crisis. We cannot integrate the singular crisis of death into our lives. We cannot bracket the future within a panoramic view. The future is at once anticipated in our providential activities and surreal in its defiance of our expectations. The future as “yet unknown” is the truth of apocalypse. It is no myth. It is real, even as any crisis is always surreal. The unknown is not known, except by images of unanticipated blessing and unexpected terror. Mythology is an attempt to smooth into timelessness our yearnings amid time in a world that finally denies their possibility. By contrast, biblical apocalypse gives the future as real, already impinging on the present as both surprise and dread. Time is real and inexorable in its movement toward death. One taken and another left is an apocalyptic reality that is always occurring and increasingly so with ageing, which is the same shudder of time but in very slow motion. Time moves in one direction, even if by memory we integrate past experiences into a cohesive perspective. In biblical testimony, memory recalls past anticipation of God’s promises becoming a present reality. Memory concerns expectation as each experience of God’s faithfulness is recalled in anticipation of the future. Without this, we shudder within time’s inexorable invitation of adverse events and finally, the most adverse of events—death. Time exceeds our capacity to contain it, expanding beyond our fragile integrations of the past merely within our horizon. Our lives are distended by time that never stops expanding into the future. Time summons us to judgment. Time indicts as it strips us of everything that cannot endure. We are finally before God as the only durable source of our existence. Time summons this recognition. We live within the crisis of time given by God who is the only resolution to this crisis. We are appointed to die and after that, the judgment. We only need one day on which to die. We die by appointment. Even if we do not know which day, we are only appointed one calendar day on which to die. There is only one date of death on tombstones. If we could observe time, we would see it shudder with death. By contrast to romanticism in which life and death complement each other in seamless cycles, human life shudders, with each life haunted by its eventual termination. We await an appointment that will occur one day, which could be any today. In biblical testimony, pervasive anticipation of a new time is unlike the cyclical seasons endorsed within myth and rite. Life is more than repetitions to be affirmed, even religiously, in cyclical rhythms within which each life is encompassed by death. The future of God is the possibility of hope and anticipation. To fear God as I will be who I will be is to tremble before pure life-giving creativity—as not like our time with its punctuation of death. To tremble before the living God is to expose ourselves to life that exceeds the fatal shudder of time through the giver of all time. Biblical testimony reiterates that days are coming when a new thing will occur. Creation of time implies completion of that for which time is given. Redemption and eschatology are inseparable; the past and present can be transformed by anticipation of a new future within the only life that encompasses this future. v Christian eschatology alleviates anxiety about the future, which is already given in the resurrection. Whenever reference is made by secular society to hope and expectation of a different future, this is made within an implicit theological slip-stream of eschatology, yet without the enduring resources that are given with this reality. The gospel summons our hearing, decisions, trust and anticipation toward different possibilities. In biblical apocalypse, time is not timeless but eventful with redemptive decisions. Time is punctuated with significance; what happens in time is crucial. As our source of volitional and relational life, God is ever-approaching in the creative word that is ever-new. As this word of promise invokes our response, it can be eventful as redemptive today, even if it casts further anticipation before us. Actively, to engage the word of God in events of life-giving grace is to allay anxious passivity before the shudder of time. If the future is yet to occur, it is also always yet to be engaged with freedom, decisions and responsibility as new events and effects amid human life and relationships. These can be redemptive in creative love that is resourced by creative triune life. Christian hope is expressed dramatically in diverse images, each time glimpsing an aspect of the future reality of God, which exceeds the scope of language while also being expressed in language. In New Testament apocalypse, hyperbolic images of the future are given in expression of faith not in spite of faith. They exhibit the perpetual shudder of time, which is everywhere present, while disclosing our only possibility for the future in God alone—the source of time without fearful shudder. The language of apocalypse gives us reality in excess—brim-full and overflowing with an integral future for all human life as the future of God in grace. Words and images exceed in expression what can be expressed. Like the punctuated reality of time itself, we are compelled to speak within a syncopation of familiar and strange tongues—of our future in which time shudders in the absence of any coherent hope, even as we tremble before God of the future and source of time as gift that is without shudder in Jesus Christ. |
