Advent is here, but it Begins with the End!
The First Sunday of Advent begins the Church’s Liturgical Year. Yet, the scripture readings and the Liturgy for this Sunday are not about the beginning of all things but rather the End of all things!
‘There will be signs in the sun and moon and stars; on earth nations in agony, bewildered by the clamour of the ocean and its waves; men dying of fear as they await what menaces the world, for the powers of heaven will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory’ [Luke 21:25-27].
Now, ancient peoples had no clocks and no watches, at best they had sun dials. But still they did measure time and they did so by using the sun, the moon and the stars. So, when Jesus refers to ‘the signs in the sun, the moon and the stars’ he is referring to time and is saying that ‘Time’s Up’ for the whole world and these are the signs that will accompany the End!
The word ‘Advent’ means ‘the Coming’, but Advent begins not with the First Coming of Christ when he came in humility and was born in Bethlehem, rather it begins with the Second Coming of Christ when he will come in power and glory to judge the living and the dead at the end of time. As gravity in space bends light, so Christ in his Church bends time, hence on this First Sunday of Advent we find, paradoxically, that we begin the new Liturgical year of the Church with the End of all things, the end of time.
We Catholics have an uncanny relationship with time as the Liturgical dimension of our existence bears out. Our relationship with time reflects the three historical roots of the Church - Hebrew, Greek and Roman. These roots give us firstly the notion of time as a line with a beginning and an end and we owe this notion to the Hebrew scriptures. Secondly, these roots give us another important distinction about time which we owe to the Greek language, the language of both the New Testament and the Septuagint [the translation into Greek of the Hebrew Old Testament] - for the Greeks had two words for time and thus distinquished Chronos time from Kairos time.
We come now to the two Greek words for time: Chronos and Kairos. Why is this distinction important? Because, in the Gospel accounts we find that the word Kairos is carefully and widely used right from the beginning of the proclamation of the Gospel: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe in the gospel” [Mark 1:15].
How do these terms help us to understand both Advent and the Gospel of Salvation? Chronos is clock time, whereas Kairos is presence time. Chronos ticks and tocks like a clock for it is all about quantity, whereas Kairos is all about the filling of time with a quality of presence, quality-time. Persons be they divine, angelic or human cultivate Chronos-time into Kairos-time. Kairos is that experience that we mortals have of time standing still, dragging on or flying by and it reveals how the quality of our personal presence does indeed impact on the passing of time as it either fills or fails to fill it with meaning and purpose.
We find this notion of time laid out in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 in which time is being filled and is thus spoken of as kairos, not chronos:
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.
Clearly we can say that the Body exists in Chronos time, whereas the Soul exists in Kairos time. It is why we do not have a clock in our church, for worship calls people into the spiritual dimension where kairos time operates. But there is many a priest and many a lay person who constantly look at their watches during Mass as they are in a hurry to get back out into the world to do their business and in so doing reveal themselves to be held by a worldly spirit locked in chronos time. Such people never have enough time for God, Worship, Prayer or Sacred Service as it is being constantly eaten away by the demands this world makes on it’s slaves. Their life is marked by being too busy for God as they are out and about obeying the business of this world. The word BUSY stands in their case for Being Under Satan’s Yoke! It is why you will always find a clock in a prominent place in churches run by such priests for such people who either ‘celebrate’ or want the quick Mass!
Kairos cultivates Chronos. The kairos principle turns times and dates and timetables into calendars which in turn are drawn up to and into the spiritual dimension of a liturgical calendar. Thus the seasons of nature become the seasons for worship which in turn become the seasons of the soul.
Unlike the East and the Druids where time is cyclical, be it the Samsara of birth-death-rebirth or be it a serpent eating its tale, the linear concept of time is, for the Hebrew, the floor of history which has a begining and an end. But History is more than a chronology of events, of kings, of warriors, of political intrigue and battles as in Thucydides ‘Peloponnesian Wars’ - this is a History that owes its form to a Chronos form of time. For the Hebrew mind history has a deeper meaning and is reflected in the use of kairos for time, as kairos is filled with meaning and purpose. History for a Jew has purpose for it reveals a will running through it, orchestrating it and revealing mysteries in and through it. A will that is intelligent, provident, purposeful and benevolent despite all the appearances of a fallen world ruled by tooth and claw, gold, fire and sword! For this will is the Divine omnipotent Will of an omniscient, eternal, and infinite intelligence that belongs to the supra-personal Being whom the Hebrews called ‘The Lord God’.
Now returning to the Hebrew view of time, we note that Our Lord Jesus said that “salvation comes from the Jews” [John 4:22]. The Lord God chose and created a particular people out of one man called Abraham so that they would become for all peoples the ark of history. In their story, their history, we find that the Lord God reveals to these people the underpinning undertow and directionality of time that is cultivated into salvation history. This history of salvation is made known by divinely inspired prophets and seers who voice, declare, guard and hand on the secret of this history that is the story of salvation. A secret that is hidden but is increasingly manifested as this story moves forward from foreshadowing the secret to imaging and finally revealing the secret. For history turns on this mystery which starts out as a secret but gradually becomes a people’s story, a land’s story, a nation’s story, a kingdom’s story, a temple’s story, a priest-king’s story, to be ultimately someone’s story, His-Story.
The secret that has been made manifest is this that history is defined by the Word becoming flesh. Here the Incarnation, the Word made flesh, is where and when time and eternity meet, the finite and the infinite meet, history and story meet for here the natural and supernatural meet because the divine and human meet in one divine person, Our Lord Jesus Christ who is the only begotten Son of our Heavenly Father. Our Lord Jesus is the Divine Word through whom all things were, are and will be made, through whom all things are kept in being and through whom all things are brought to their final fulfilment, their completion and their end. So history is fundamentally and ultimately His-Story and it is a story of salvation. He truly is the End of History because he is its beginning for he is the Alpha and the Omega - the Beginning and the End!
In every generation until the End of the World His-story of Salvation is made present by the Liturgy of the Church to every time, place and people. The Divine Liturgy brings all times and places and all peoples and their stories into the heart and the crux of history which is the paschal mystery of the life, death and resurrection of Our Lord Jesus. The Paschal Mystery brings the clay, blood and soil of all our histories into this supernatural centre, crux and crucible of Time, Space and Story for it is the Time of all times, the Place of all spaces and the Story of all stories. It is here that we find the Roman genius of Law, Rite, Order, Spiritual Warfare and Mission operating in and through the Liturgical life of the Mystical Body of Christ: on earth, as the Church Militant; in Purgatory, as the Church Suffering; and in Heaven, as the Church Triumphant. The Divine Liturgy of the Church turns the chronos time of dates into the kairos time of ferias, memorias, feasts, Sundays and solemnities.
In this Divine Liturgy the life of every human is called into being divinised! It alone accomplishes in the souls of men and women healing, enlivening, forgiveness, replenishing and perfection. Here in the Divine Liturgy is the Coming into View of a human being transfigured, deiformed and divinised which is the End for which God has made every human being. But this End is only accomplished when human beings wish it, desire it and choose it. Thus, at the beginning of Advent we find the End, the End of all things. The Divine Liturgy reminds us that the End is what starts all our beginnings; the beginning that is the Adventure of being!
“The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap... When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.”
[G.K. Chesterton, ‘Heretics’].
NB This article is inspired by Peter Kreeft in one of his discussions on the relationship of chronos time and kairos time to eternity in his wonderful book called ‘Everything you ever wanted to know about heaven: but never dreamt of asking’ [Ignatius Press, 1982].