Christ has transformed our lives in every way, including time. New Years, as a holiday, follows Christmas perfectly. The “eternal intrusion” (Janet, 1961) of the Timeless One entering time has forever altered our experience of time. Christ comes to us in the Virgin, in the Holy Spirit, and will come to us in His Glorious Second Advent. His coming interrupts time, even rearranges time. We live, now, in a new “Eighth Day” of creation, in which all things are made new. Christ now “marks time” in ours lives like nothing and no one else. And herein is our hope. The vexed, but Christ-renewed poet, W.H. Auden, learned this. Christ inspired his wartime poem, “For the Time Being” (1945):
“He is the Truth. Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety; You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.”
Kierkegaard, reflected on time and preached, “In relation to the absolute (Christ), there is only one tense, —the present …” (1944).
The Scriptures put it this way—and it is a gracious gift to us as we think of a New Year: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Indeed, the old passing away is ” … spontaneously, like the snow of early spring before the advancing sun” (Jamieson et al, 1871).
Works Cited
Auden, W. H. (1945). For the time being. London: Faber and Faber.
Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2001). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.
Jamieson, R., Fausset, A. R., Smith, B. M., Brown, D., & Jamieson, R. (1871). The Holy Bible: According to the Authorised Version, with original and selected parallel references and marginal readings, an an original and copious critical and explanatory commentary. Boston: Gould and Lincoln.
Janet, M. (1961). W. H. Auden. Renascence, 13(3), 115-118. doi:10.5840/renascence196113328
Kierkegaard, S., Lowrie, W., & Kierkegaard, S. (1944). Training in Christianity: And, the Edifying discourse which ‘accompanied’ it (p. 66). Princeton: Princeton University Press.