Do you all have your compasses with you? What? You don’t have compasses? Well, I guess neither do I. How about your watch? Okay! A much better response that time. I have my watch, too — but don’t get your hopes up that I’m planning to keep a closer eye on how long my sermons are taking! I really just wanted to make a point about how much we rely on our watches in comparison to our compasses. And I doubt that very many of us have a compass that we can carry around — we may have one on our car. We know our streets well enough to get where we want to go, and maybe we have a general sense of north, south, east, and west, but our sense of time is really much more precise. To illustrate, you can probably all tell me with a fairly high degree of accuracy how long this service has lasted thus far, but when I turn a little this way or turn a little that way can you tell me whether I’m facing south southeast, or north northwest, or somewhere in between?
In earlier times, the situation would have been reversed. People would have had only a very imprecise sense of the time. It was either day or night, they did know that, and they knew whether the sun was rising, which meant morning, or straight up, which meant mid-day, or setting, which meant afternoon and evening.
Gradually, they began to notice that during the day the shadow cast by a tree, a rock, or even their own body was long early in the morning and grew shorter and shorter until it disappeared when the sun was overhead in the middle of the day. They also would have noticed that the shadow grew longer again, on the other side of the tree, as night came.
After a while they were able to tell how much of the day was over by looking at these shadows. The first timepiece was probably invented by a person who put a stick in the ground and made marks in the dirt to show where the stick’s shadow was every hour. The shadow stick is the earliest form of sundial. People judged the time of day by the length and position of the stick’s shadow. The technical name for a shadow stick is gnomon (NO mon), which is Greek for “the one that knows.” Sometime later, the ancient Egyptians built tall stone towers called obelisks, and everybody could tell the time by looking at the obelisk’s shadow.
Around 1500 B.C., smaller Egyptian timepieces were created. The sundial was a smaller version of the obelisk. By the Middle Ages, peasants in northern Europe had cleverly begun to use sundials carved into the bottom of their wooden clogs. To tell time, the peasant would take off his shoe and stand it up facing the sun. The hour was told by the shadow the heel cast on the dial. Until the invention of the clock in the fourteenth century, people told time with their handy, but by today’s standards very imprecise, sundials!
By contrast, early peoples had fairly precise methods for determining direction. Early explorers looked to the stars, especially the North Star, for guidance as they navigated their ships across the oceans. Beginning in the thirteenth century, when the magnetic compass was perfected as a navigational instrument, the explorers could take their bearings confidently and avoid shipwreck in the daytime as well. They might not know whether the time was closer to 10:25 or 10:30, but they knew very well how to avoid dangerous rocks and reefs.
I’d like to take us back to this earlier time in a sense, to a time when direction mattered more than time. I think that if we pay more attention to what this morning’s scripture tells us about direction than we do to what it suggests about time, we’ll key in much more easily to its message for us this morning, on the first Sunday of Lent, as we begin our Lenten journey together.
It’s the familiar story of Jesus’ baptism, by John the Baptist in the Jordan River, with the Spirit descending like a dove upon him, and God’s voice, saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” This was followed by forty days of spiritual trial by Satan in the wilderness. Forty days, like the forty days of Lent.
Even though I suppose the logical aspect of this passage to focus on is Jesus’ time of trial in the wilderness that followed his baptism, to explore the parallels that can be drawn between Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness and the forty days of Lent that began on Ash Wednesday, what interests me most this morning is the sequence of events that follows Jesus’ forty days of trial. At some point thereafter, John was arrested, and this event — the arrest of his own pastor, you might say — spurred Jesus into action. This was when his ministry began, when he came to Galilee and proclaimed the good news of God, that “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
Jesus’ ministry began because the time for it to begin had come. The moment of truth had arrived — it was time for God’s children to repent, or to turn away from how they were then living their lives, and return to living lives of faithfulness. While Jesus’ message contained an expectation within it, of repentance, this was good news for the people of his time, for it meant that despite whatever their shortcomings had been, whether individually or as societies and nations, God was ready to welcome them back into the fold.
As wonderful and as liberating as this message must have been to hear, back then when Jesus was spreading this good word through the communities of Galilee, we’ve had a harder and harder time as the years have passed by in reclaiming its original freshness. I think that our difficulty has to do in large part with how we think about time, a difficulty that we can ease if we try to reclaim our ancestors’ greater sensitivity to direction.
Jesus called on people to repent because the time to do so had come: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.” “The time is now,” we might say today, or “the time is right.” So much of the “time,” we do things because it’s “time” to do them. The time to repent and to return in faithfulness to God had come. But what does this mean for today, 2,000 years later? If the time to repent was fulfilled then, what are we to do today?
This is an example of how sometimes our mindsets that work perfectly well for some purposes can trip us up for others. We are very precise about time these days, but for Jesus and the people of his day his reference to the fulfillment of time had little to do with what we might read back into it, in terms of apocalyptic expectations about whether time as they knew it was about to come to an end. Rather, if we are to be true to what Jesus meant when he said it, the phrase “the time is fulfilled” had more to do with his sense that the world as he and his society knew it — with its inherited symbols, rites, institutions, and relationships — was passing away, and a new age, an age over which God would reign, was beginning.
As theologian David Batstone describes, Jesus’ teachings were designed to help his listeners understand the nature of the new era of God’s reign. The expected eternal fates of a poor beggar and a callous rich man are reversed (Luke 16:19-31); the repentant, though despised, publican is accepted before the “righteous” Pharisee (Luke 18:10-13); the laborers in the vineyard regain the land controlled by a greedy, absentee landlord (Matthew 20:1-16; Mark 12:1-12); a desperate and persistent widow receives mercy from, of all people, a judge (Luke 18:2-6); a peasant farmer is miraculously able to find the land and seed he needs in order to cultivate a sustainable harvest (Mark 4:1-9).1
To the extent we lock in on our modern, linear, precise sense of time and view Jesus’ words from this perspective, we create such problems for ourselves that when we stop and think about it make it nearly impossible to get excited about the idea that a new heaven and a new earth are taking the place of the old ones. Since the new ones didn’t replace the old ones during Jesus’ lifetime, which it appears he sincerely and eagerly anticipated, as did the Apostle Paul, nor during the subsequent 2,000 years of human history, we have a hard time “keeping faith” in this aspect of the gospel message, that the kingdom of God is at hand.
Time to reach for our compasses. Consider the possibility that this passage has more to do with the direction that we are moving in within time, and the kinds of lives we lead within time, than with whether time as we know it is coming to an end. Jesus was talking about the direction his culture was moving in, and the kinds of lives people were leading, and was saying, “Hey! It’s time to change course, and time to change lives.”
“Sure!” his listeners may have thought. “Like it’s in our power to change the forces that control so much of our lives.” “That’s just it,” Jesus might have responded, “it’s not in your power, but it is within God’s, and God is acting now to transform the world we all live in.” For example, the temple in Jerusalem — yes, it serves the interests of a small, wealthy ruling class while burdening, or at best ignoring, the majority of the poor (Mark 12:38-44). Though the temple may seem to occupy a permanent position as the most sacred of spaces, Jesus astounds the disciples with his prediction that it will one day be destroyed (Mark 13:1-2). Calamity, and wars between nations, civil strife, and violence, persecution, earthquakes, plagues, and famines will all follow, at which point the sun will turn dark, the moon will turn to blood, the planets will fall from the heavens, and the entire cosmos will break out in convulsions (Mark 13:7-13, 24-25).
Is that what has happened? No, at least not yet, and if we are looking at this through our favorite lenses, the lenses of chronological time, none of this can make very much sense.
But that’s not what Jesus was talking about. Remember the compass, and the importance of direction. Chaos in the heavens and turmoil on earth proclaim that God will no longer put up with life as we know it, that a change of direction is coming, and we’d better get with the program. God no longer consented to the “peace of Rome” under which the people of Galilee were living, that had been defended despite its shortcomings as a net benefit to the well-being and security of the people. In fact, “Jesus’ prophetic message of denunciation and announcement hearkens back to a similar apocalyptic vision proclaimed by Isaiah: ‘On that day Yahweh will punish the host of heaven in heaven, and on earth the kings of the earth.... Then the moon will be abashed, and the sun ashamed; for the Lord of hosts will reign ...’ ” (Isaiah 24:21-13).2
When Jesus said, “the time is fulfilled,” we might say that he was really talking about direction more than time. Jesus was offering “a way of looking at the world that rejected the dominant powers” of the temple priesthood and Roman rulers “as the ultimate point of reference for the world,” as the definers of right and wrong, of whether too little for the people really is enough. Jesus was pointing in a new direction, toward “another horizon where justice may reign.”3 As Batstone concludes, “Jesus invited and inspired his hearers to make specific, historical choices that broke with the powers of evil to create the conditions by which new worlds might be generated. His works of compassion and his parabolic teachings of reversal provided ‘glimpses of another world where the power relations and social givens of this world are suspended and examined, perhaps even subverted and shattered.’ ”4
So the fulfillment of time had nothing to do with the end of the world as we know it, but rather to do with “the actual transformation of human history itself.” Jesus proclaimed that an about-face was underway, and called for a reversal of “the value judgments of a world that held up its own construction of reality as ultimate”5 and eternal and never-changing.
Today we are still being called to reorient ourselves. Too often we take the status quo for granted, when despite the immensity of the social and political and international challenges we are facing, Jesus proclaims the “ ‘good news’ of an approaching dawn when love and justice will reign.”6 For these forty days of Lent, let’s trade in our watches for compasses, and tune in to the new direction in which Jesus calls us to move.
1.David B. Batstone, “Jesus, Apocalyptic, and World Transformation,” Theology Today 49 (1992), p. 390.
2.Ibid., 395.
3.Ibid., 395.
4.Ibid., p. 396 (quoting William Herzog, “The Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Discovery of the Apocalyptic Jesus,” Pacific Theological Review 19/2 [Spring, 1985], p. 35).
5.Ibid., p. 397.
6.Ibid., p. 397.