God Is Not Time’s Adversary

Great Little one! whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heav’n to earth.
                                                                          —Richard Crashaw

It is an axiom of belief central to the teaching of the Church that, when Christ came among us, His outward appearance in every respect indistinguishable from any other human being on the planet, nothing in nature or human history would ever be the same again. As an old professor of mine used to say, “Once the Incarnation happens, everything changes.” 

Not even time itself will remain undisturbed by God having entered fully into its rhythm and flow, imbuing it with a meaning it had not known before. If time were a river, a current ever in flux, its very coursing will now have been redirected, reconstituted as a medium for the transmission of grace. Time and its constructs are no longer things to escape from but rather to enter in to, to explore right to the end, moving as Christ Himself has shown us, to the very limit of the finite world.  

What I mean to say here is that if Christ had created time, if by His orchestrations He moves and sustains it from moment to moment, how could He be the least bit hostile or indifferent to it? He is, after all, the Lord of time, of history, by whom and through whom and with whom and in whom all things move. Creation has no point of origin, no point of finality, nor any point of balance in between, apart from Christ. There can be no union, no intimacy with Christ, with the human being Jesus, apart from time, outside of or averse to that very medium in which He Himself moved through all the stages of our common human life.  

Thus, from the first moment Christ plunged into time, into a world bound by time, all of creation found itself renewed, repristinated; “charged,” as it were, to use an image hallowed by the poet Hopkins, “with the grandeur of God.”

So what does time now do in its diurnal rhythm and flow but “flame out, like shining from shook foil; / It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil / Crushed.” And for all that we’ve sought to flatten and debase the flow, neither time nor nature are ever really “spent”:

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastwards, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

How important it was for the Apostle to the Gentiles, to remind us of the actual details of the birth of God’s Son, the eternal Logos no less, placing the event square in the midst of time, so that its very “fullness” should coincide with the exact instant of Incarnation. “When the fullness of time had come,” St. Paul tells us, “God sent forth his Son, born of woman” (Galatians 4:4). 

How could eternity have possibly penetrated more deeply into the structures of temporality than it did on that blessed day when a young Jewish girl agreed to carry the Child of the Most High God in her womb and into the world? “Behold I make all things new,” Christ tells us in Revelation 21:5. He has indeed brought all things, including time itself, to a state of perfect newness.

“In the Great Sea of our Usual Life, a Continuous Newness.” (Luigi Giussani)  

And so it is most certainly true to say that with the coming of Christ, from the first moment of his Incarnation, an unimaginable irruption of eternity into time has taken place, ushering a totally new world into existence. How could the impact of such an event not be fraught with the most incalculable, far-reaching import?

Yes, but how are we to square all this with sin, with the grief and the pain that mark a fallen world, a world which, despite all the wonders we predicate of Christ’s coming among us, has not grown more perfect but continues to convulse and corrupt all things? Are we not still held hostage to time, to a world that remains in the grip of intractable evils? Far from promoting human happiness, time seems bent on thwarting it at every turn. “Who will,” asks Hans Urs von Balthasar, “gather up the futilities and despairs?

Who has so much compassion that he does not simply watch sympathetically (from his own freedom from suffering which he has perhaps achieved), nor wrathfully plans for redress (for the next time), but in solidarity bears the responsibility for all that cries to heaven, bears it in compassion (which must cry even more frightfully to heaven)?

It is not an easy question; nor is the answer any easier. Which means it will not be found in a syllogism; it is not a problem in search of a solution. It is, instead, a mystery—and one which only Christ can solve because He is Himself the mystery. And He carries that mystery right to the Cross on which He freely hangs for the world’s salvation. “Only if,” says von Balthasar, 

he is the Son who gathers all forsakenness into himself in the Godforsakenness on the Cross, and if he is the love between the two, and if the love stretched and extended to the uttermost is a single Spirit, Spirit of the Father and the Son, Spirit of strength and weakness, Spirit of the same love: only then do I receive a key which makes the meaning of being credible and endurable to me—without my comprehending either the meaning or being. 

We are not saved by a discourse, however eloquent, delivered by a mere preacher man. Only the living God can save us now, which He set out to do on Calvary. And having suffered and died in our place, He has redeemed all of us, including the time we are given to grow in holiness of life. And if you say you understand it, well, then, it is not God, nor the action of God, you have understood.