Last week we heard from Paul who wrote in Galatians that
there is no longer Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free but all are one
in Christ Jesus, so you are excused if you find it a bit strange that in the
very next chapter in Galatians Paul begins by comparing children who are heirs
to slaves. But that should also be a clue that Paul is making a point about who
we are as human beings—that we were enslaved to sin even outside of our control,
and so God sent Jesus to adopt us while we were still children. Still, this is
a jarring metaphor. So, is the metaphor of being children. Mostly, we don’t
like being called children. Sure, we can understand Jesus telling us we must
become like children to enter the
kingdom of God, but being like a
child is different from being called a child. We don’t want to be slaves or
children—can’t we just be adults?
One way to understand Paul’s metaphors is to understand
God’s time against our time. All of this has to do with time actually,
specifically how our lives move forward from childhood to adulthood toward
becoming an elder in your family or your community. We see time as a
progression—a gradual expense that builds us into wiser, better people. We
spend time, but Paul uses a slightly different metaphor for time. He says that
time gets full. I find myself drawn to this metaphor in Galatians 4:4, which
reads: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son…” I find myself in
wonder over the concept of time’s fullness. This is a metaphor that is hard for
us in the 21st century when time is measured by our phones and
watches—when time is told by arms moving around a clock-face or, more often, by
numbers scrolling across a digital display. Time, for us, marks the next in a
series of to-do list items, and so we imagine it’s always in short supply. We
don’t talk about time’s fullness for one because we don’t use hourglasses
anymore—even our board games that once had those little minute-glasses have
been replaced with digital countdown devices that go tick-tock, tick-tock—but we
also don’t talk about time’s fullness because we are so busy cramming things
into our time that we don’t step back to consider the way that time can fill up
rather than drain away. Our image of time is so often of running out, but God’s
image of time is fullness. Sand accumulating, not sand spent.
This image of time’s fullness opens up my imagination. I
imagine everything in my life having an hourglass filling up—everything from
the things I purchase to the relationships I have; all of it is filling up and
one day will be full. The same can be said for all of us. Ever thing you’ve
ever owned, every relationship you’ve ever been in, and even your life itself
is an hourglass filling up. It only moves one direction and it never stands
still. Full hourglasses are littered about your lives. Imagine that your life
is a cathedral gradually filling with those full hourglasses. I say it is a
cathedral but maybe it’s a castle, maybe it’s a cabin, maybe it’s a mountain
top. Whatever space you imagine to be your own, it is filled with friends and
relationships that are no more, with things that have broken or been upgraded
and replaced, and it is gradually, little by little, a space being filled from
floor to ceiling. Time is only ever getting fuller
The good news we have is that God sent his Son in the
fullness of time—not apart from the choices we make and the things that are
full in our lives but precisely to save us from the things that are fullest,
the things we can never take back, and the fact that we can never go back. Jesus came at full time; not so that we can
fix things but so that God can fix what is unfixable. This is a tremendous
relief for all of us whose hourglasses are filling, and it frees us to consider
what we are doing with the things in our lives that are full. What are we doing
with our full hourglasses? Are we gazing at them, wishing for the sand to rise
again? Are we placing them on our altar and worshipping that past that can
never be again? Or are we taking those things that are full and standing on the
shoulders of giants—even ones we feel we can never live up to—as we realize
through time’s fullness who we are?
I love this scripture because the imagery of time’s
fullness runs side by side with the imagery of childhood and slavery. We are
children, we are slaves to things we cannot control, but we are made right in
time. Christ didn’t come most of the way, while our sand was still falling. No,
Christ came when time was absolutely, fully spent. Then, he came to make us
children again. Christ came to take away our slavery to the sand falling
inexorably toward its only end, and instead he showed us something different: We
are children of God—all of us. Not well-adjusted adults of God. Not parents,
born from God. Rather, children… and we stand on the shoulders of those who
have gone before, we are better for the experiences behind us, but we are
perfected through Christ who restores us not to the perfect adults we want to
be but to the children we always are in our hearts.
So, don’t hear time’s fullness as a thing to worry over,
don’t fret that there isn’t enough time, and don’t complain that you are out of
time, because Christ meets you precisely where you are spent—where you are
dead, where your slavery of sin and of death (and even of gravity) are most
evident. The cathedral of our lives fills and fills and fills until it is completely
full, but then God does something remarkable. He sends his son, Jesus, who does
the impossible and turns the whole cathedral upside down. Not just once but again
and again and again—not so that we repeat what has been but so that we
experience what the fullness of time means in a place apart from pain and
suffering.
Who knew that scripture about children was a meditation
on death? And yet all good things are through God who tells us that time’s
fullness is good, that Good Friday was good, that we were created “good” for
something beyond this life. It isn’t evident at first that fullness will be
good for us. That’s where trust comes in. And it’s hard to do. But through
Christ we are promised that we are no longer slaves but children, and as
children heirs to a promise, so that time is not what we thought it was, that
God is turning it all upside-down, and we are made new in a way we never saw
coming.
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