We are creatures of time. Yet, although our watches are incredibly accurate and our mobile phones are tethered to internet time we are not very good at telling the time. Of course we know whether it is Tuesday or Friday and we can usually turn up at a dental appointment ‘on time’. The ancient Greeks called this kind of time keeping chronos. This gave us the English word ‘chronometer’. Chronos is measured to a hundredth of a second if you are fighting for a place on the FI Grand Prix grid.
But the Greeks also needed to mark time in a different way and they called this Kairos. Kairos isn’t a way of measuring the passage of time. It is what happens in time – in the moments when it feels like the clock has stopped and we are caught up in an experience that takes us out of the daily grind and forms rich memories that never leave us. We don’t have a word in English for this way of reckoning time. Which makes it difficult for us to enter fully into the rhythm of the Christian Year.
Lent fills most of March and the early part of April this year. We were not there when Jesus was born, when he preached to the crowds, healed the sick, or was nailed to the cross. We know the story, we know what happened before Jesus was crucified and what happened afterwards. We can read the accounts of those who were eyewitnesses to these events. We might even believe them. But this leaves them in the never to be repeated past.
These events really matter. But how they matter also matters. As we walk the path with Jesus towards his death we learn to die to self ourselves. And in dying we are born to eternal life. The staggering truth is that in Jesus the eternal God entered history in a particular time and place in order to transform ordinary time into the reality of eternity. As a result those of us who are latecomers to the story have the opportunity for the same relationship to God as the first generation eyewitnesses. We are invited to live the life eternal in the here and now, entering what James K.A. Smith calls “The Sacred Folds of Kairos” that transform every moment into a door through which the eternal love of God might enter.Dave Adams LLM
