Perfect Timing

Are you punctual for your appointments? You are my hero if you are. It is not easy for people to discipline themselves, plan, and get to their events on time. I admire people who leave in plenty of time to arrive early to things. It’s not in the real Beatitudes, but I say “Blessed are the prompt, for they arrive ahead of time.” Now, if I can just reverse my pattern over six decades of personal history, I too will be on time for things.

People’s attitude about time and schedule differs from person to person and from culture to culture. There are blessings within each attitude. Look at the way different languages speak of the workings of one’s watch. In some languages, the phrase translates to, “My watch is walking.” In English, we say, “My watch is running.” In German, the phrase is “My watch is functioning.” One connotes a relaxed approach to the flow of time and schedule, another, a hurried approach, the last points to the precision and orderliness of the tools of life. Perhaps it is about the preference of orderliness and precision for life itself.

We encounter human events within the context of chronological time and ponder mysteries of how time might work with God. Even though we attach the concept of eternity to the divine, for the most part, the Hebrew and Christian traditions of theology hold that God is eternal, but acts with divine energy and purpose within the time and space reality of human experience. How can we explain the God of eternity operating within time? One of those questions for heaven, I surmise. I find it incomprehensible, but like with all things, for God nothing is impossible.

Maybe you have heard the term “Salvation history.” Judeo-Christian thought and the biblical record sees the created order as starting somewhere, moving through time, and heading toward an end determined by God.  It remains mysterious to creatures that operate in an experience as we do: how can the Creator exist in the Eternal Now and still operate within our mathematical experience of a time-space continuum. Things that happen come into our awareness; we see those events as happening sequentially. We imagine that God, for whom time is all laid out at once in the present, still brings divine initiatives into our experience.

In the Epistle reading for this Sunday, Paul, writing to Christians in Rome, speaks of God disclosing a long-kept secret. We hear of a mystery revealed in the time of Jesus’ disciples of the first century. This was news of salvation, and the reality of God coming into our world, into that time: “Welcome to our world, God,” we could say. It is an event prophesied to all the nations. Eternal God picked a time, a perfect time, and acted for the salvation of the human family. Look over the passage—Paul declares:

Now to God who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed, and through the prophetic writings is made known to all the Gentiles, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith—to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever! Amen.  —Romans 16:25-27

When the time was right, and operating through just the right setting, God moved, and thus were we healed. Some theologians speak of the “scandal of particularity.” Why that time, why that way? It can be bothersome to think about something so big and universal to have been wrought in the particulars of Palestine two millennia ago. At a particular time, in a particular place through particular people, indeed, through a particular person, God came into the world. C.S. Lewis marvels about this in his book, Miracles. He mentions it is not so much about the human search for God, but something God did for humanity, selecting Abraham’s ancestor of a nation, to carry a peculiar intuition and covenantal relation to God. That nation escapes dying in the desert, and later escapes being trapped in Babylon. The process narrows further and further. Lewis puts it this way:

The process grows narrower and narrower, sharpens at last into one small bright point like the head of a spear. It is a Jewish girl at her prayers. All humanity (so far as concerns its redemption) has narrowed to that. (From Miracles, Chapter 14)

Around Christmas, we let our minds dance about this astounding process God worked into the messy context of location and history for us. We contemplate words of Paul to the Galatians and his wonderful phrase about what God did “in the fullness of time”:

So with us; while we were minors, we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.   — Galatians 4:4-5

O Mary, dear Mary, thank you for saying yes to God and choosing to cooperate within the divine plan for our salvation. We also love the use of the aforementioned phrase in his writing to another first-century Christians:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ… he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. — Ephesians 1:1, 9-10

My timing, scheduling, and discipline are far from perfect, but God does things perfectly: in the fullness of time, with just the right figures. I speak fondly but in amusement about a dear family friend who always tried to squeeze one more good thing into her schedule. She was predictably quite late for every engagement, but we were always sure she had fit an amazing number of things into the hours of that day. Perhaps some are too strict about promptness. I am sure some of us are too careless. Thank goodness for God’s timing, and God’s love by which, in just the right way, and in the fullness of time, we all were included in the saving action of God’s most gracious plan.