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TIME :
a sermon praught by Richard Major
at the Sung Mass of the Circumcision (transferred), 2nd January, 2000, in St Marks, Florence.
Rite B Mass, with English Missal,
Collects: Circumcision (heart mortified), Nativity (pure Virgin); Romans iv8-14 (Abraham uncircumcised); Luke ii15-21 (shepherds, circumcised, called Jesus).
Hymns: Conquering Kings, EH37, Crown Him with many crowns, EH 381, and carols.
et postquam consummati sunt dies octo (gospel)
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. AMEN.
IT IS, I SUPPOSE, part of my job to proclaim the truth to you, and warn you against error; so it's fair enough for me to point out that this morning we are just as much in the twentieth century (that disgusting epoch) as we were a few days ago. We have not just celebrated a new millennium. We have not begun a new century, or even a new decade. We are still in the last decade of the twentieth century, the last century of the second Christian millennium. The year 2000 is the last year of the twentieth century, and by no means the first year of the twenty-first century.
It should be obvious why this is true. There was no year zero, so the first century ended at the end of the hundredth year which is why it can be called a century that is, at the end of the year 100; and the second century began on the first of January, A.D. 101: 1/1/01. The third century began on the first of January, A.D. 201: and so it went on. The nineteenth century began on the first of January, A.D. 1801: it ended, naturally, on 31st December, 1900, and on that night in St Marks, Florence, as in churches throughout Christendom, people gathered to pray for the new century, which began at midnight: 1/1/01, the first of January, 1901. There was no confusion on this point then. But there was no confusion on a good many points in 1901 which have become much darker since.
No matter: on 31st December, 2000 our uniquely savage, ungraceful and chaotic century will really be over, and we will be holding watch night services here to pray for a better epoch. Meanwhile, it is remarkable that the general decline of civilisation this century, and the stupefying effect of so-called mass education, has produced such mental darkness that most of our fellow-citizens believe that the new century began yesterday morning. Alas for human perversity, for the modern triumph of ignorance; alas for the age of the common fool.
Still, no matter how much we pooh-pooh yesterday's vulgar delusion about the year 2000, we have to admit that something has happened since last Sunday. We are, after all, suddenly confronted with a new line of zeroes at the end of the date. When my wife was a child she was obsessed with the moment that the odometer in her parents car went over each thousand miles; she used to beg them to put the car into reverse at once, so she could watch the counter run backward, the little row of zeroes miraculously turning up and not down, so that the little row of nines could come back over the horizon. My parents-in-law-to-be wisely refused to reverse the car and spoil this illusion: for it's a very sombre fact, from which children may as well be sheltered, that no dial ever goes backwards. Life runs inexorably on, on, on, the nines always roll down and become zeroes, the car gets older and worth less, the years are irrecoverable. Our stylised astonishment that on Friday the date was full of big numbers 31/12/99 and is today full of small numbers 02/01/00 has something to do with the way life strikes us.
So today's theme is time, and the passing of time. In naïve churches and from naïve pulpits today, all over Christendom, naïve sermons will be preached extolling the brave new millennium and the fresh young century. Here we are do not tolerate that fraud; today, to mark the start of the last year of this clapped-out century, doomed to be gone forever in 363 days, we will meditate on what it means to begin a new year which we know will soon be lost, and live in a century which is about to be lost, and generally what it means to exist in time, time which is always running away from us, as the dial runs onward and the sands run out, arrow swift.
WHEN SPEAKING CLOCKS, clocks that tick, were first invented, back in the Renaissance, and proudly installed at the court of the King of France, the Queen, our own Florentine Catherine de Medici, is to have fainted with horror at the noise: she exclaimed that her life was being chopped up into tiny pieces. I'm not sensitive enough to faint myself, but find the Queen's dismay sensible, as hysterias go; I too detest that menacing tick-tick-tick-tock-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-. And here's a more drastic case. A friend of mine at college had looked up in actuarial tables (given his date of birth, sex, nationality, and a few other factors) precisely how many years and fractions of a year he could expect to have before he died, if his body obeyed the averages; and then he calculated how many seconds that was. It came to 80,730,439. He then put a counter on his computer, so that at the top of the screen there was always this little box with a number in it, changing every second: 80,730,439; 80,730,438; 80,730,437; 80,730,436: he had 80,730,434 seconds left to live, 80,730,431 . He said this counter made him work harder; I think it would have driven me demented if it had been on my computer.
My problem with time, which seems to me a thoroughly normal one, is a perpetual unease about how late it is. Time seems to me always to be rushing away, running out, being used up. But there are other sorts of people, I discover, with different temperaments, who are struck and exhausted by the thought of how much time this is, ahead of us and behind us. They are staggered, they are dismayed by the infinite wastes of time on every hand; and they often have the sickening sensation that the seconds just pour by endlessly, one day much like another, changing everything, wasting everything away.
People with my temperament are this morning groaning O God! the year 2000 already, and so little to show for the last year. People of the other sort are sighing to themselves, Ah well, another year, and another one lying ahead, and then another, and another . . . . Neither sort, those dismayed by temporality and those dismayed by mutability, are very happy about time. Both sorts are left feeling dizzy. We are born in time and we die in it, but somehow, we never quite get the hang of it.
Now in the ancient world, when Christ was born and the Christian Faith was formed, people of my sort, who found time move too quickly, were quite rare. Almost everyone was of the other sort, the sort that feels oppressed by the way time doesn't seem to move meaningfully at all. Things change, then change back again, everything is mutable, and the slow sickening spin of the seasons goes on indifferently. In the ancient world, the horror was at the circular nature of time. Everything repeated itself or reversed itself, and nothing definitively gets done. Consider how horrible this would be if it were the whole truth. This city of Florence will one day be destroyed, but another similar city is sure one day to rise on the site, and to be inhabited by someone very like you, who will live more of less like you (a little more or less lucky, a little more or less virtuous), and die as you died thousands of years before, and as this new city will die, and so on and so on for ever: nothing finally accomplished, nothing defeated, nothing done that is not doomed to be undone. So in the ancient world everyone was weary of time, and longed to escape out of it into a realm of changeless perfection, into eternity.
Now, in our first hymn this morning we hailed Christ thus:
Crown Him the Lord of years,
The Potentate of time . . . . EH 3815
That isn't just grand poetry dragged in to round out a final stanza. It means something. And I think it means this.
God became man. Became is a verb in the past tense; we are talking about something that once happened, something that occured in time. There were hundreds of thousands of years when the human species and God were, in a sense, separated, and God was, to a degree, hidden from us. Then came the last two thousand years, during which we have perpetually celebrated the astounding and unexpected development that He has become one with us. And between those two vast blocs of time there was a moment, a single night, the night in which Christ was born 25 December, let us say, in the year A.D. 1. (Actually, it was a few years earlier than that, for our calendar, like most things, contains blunders.)
Before Christ was born one of the things that separated man from God was time. God was eternal, that is, He existed outside time, in eternity, changeless, perfect, ageless. Man swam through time and was consumed by it, and, as I was saying, on the whole hated it the more he thought about it. But when God became a human baby that division was torn down. God entered time. Christ, the divine man, began to move through time as we move; for Him as for us the dial rolled on inexorably, the Thursdays all turning into Fridays, the nines rolling round to zeroes, events swimming past and not returning, until there came a certain Friday when time caught Him up and He was dead.
The first event in Jesus' life after the busy night He was born was the first event in every Jewish boys life: He was circumcised when He was eight days old. When eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child, announces this morning's Gospel, His name was called JESUS. It is not entirely a coincidence that this day, the feast of the Circumcision, the first of January, is the first day of the year in the Christian calendar. For just as we date our years, a little inaccurately, from Jesus' birth, so we date our calendar from the day He first began to move through time, acquiring a name like any other name and bumping into an event which had been prescribed for all Jewish baby boys for a thousand years. God had become man, and therefore almost the first thing that happened to Him was that time rolled over Him and did things to Him. The dial rolled round from 0 to 8, and on the eighth day He felt the knife.
What is it like for us to be in time? It is to suffer: to have distant events approach us at their sickening constant pace, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick; to watch helplessly people and things receding from us at the same unbreakable speed: tick-tick-tick. What was it like for Jesus to be in time? It was to suffer. God was no longer just eternal, He was united with man; and so when the dial showed 8 days the divine man was cut with a knife, because the calendar said so. That is true helplessness.
Is it an odd way to begin a year, this feast of Circumcision? Yes and no. Of course I can see why it might seem a bit awkward or grotesque or funny. I didn't set the Latin office hymn for today's feast as one of our hymns, because it is really a bit much:
O happy day, when first was poured
The blood of our redeeming Lord!
O happy day, when first began
His sufferings for sinful man! EH 36
And I'm sorry to report that mediæval devotion to this feast produced a crop of holy foreskins, five I believe, all over Europe, specially venerated on this day. That is all quaint enough. But I'm also struck by how profound this arrangement is. For it does reveal to us Christ as Lord of years, the potentate of time, as our majestic first hymn declared. When eight days were accomplished He entered into human time, into the wearisome round of minutes, and began at once to endure that weary round, and to suffer it. And yet He is not just a victim of time, as we naturally are, but still God: that is, He remains triumphant, engulfing pain and victimhood, and makes even them part of His victory. Christ is not swallowed up by time, the way we fear we are being swallowed up: He Himself swallows time up, Lord of years, potentate of time He makes the year Christian, He envelopes the dismal spiral of moments into eternity.
Every year, every day, every second since Christ was born has been sacred time. God entered time: time, therefore, became divine. It is not just one damned thing after another, tick-tock-tick-tock, a torrent of moments rushing past us, lost as quickly as they appear. Every second since He was born is part of His deathless life, and of the deathless life of the Church, His body. Every year is a year A.D., Anno Domini, a year of the Lord. We are now beginning A.D. 2000, the 2000th year of the Lord (give or take a few for human error). And within this year, and every year, every day is sacred, being swallowed up into the life of Christ: from His Circumcision on 1 January, 2000, to Christs death on 21 April, Good Friday, to His rising on Easter Sunday, 23 April, and so back to His birth on 25 December, 2000, at the century's end.
Nor is this just a matter of Christ and His Church, for Christ's life is also our life, and your life. Over that sacred calendar, like a skin stretched over a wooden frame, is stretched your annual biography. You, just as much as Christ, have your scheduled birth, your scheduled moments of suffering, as on the feast of Circumcision of furtive glory, as on the feast of Epiphany, of hidden splendour, as on the feast of Transfiguration. Perhaps in this very Holy Year, 2000--anyway, in some year much like it--awaits your Good Friday, your death day. Even that death will not be mere meaningless defeat. You are no more a simple victim of time than Christ was. You are passing through, not a desert of wasted, wasting moments, but through a sacred cycle, a pre-ordained sequence, a pattern of hours, A.D. time, the epoch of years of Our Lord when there's no good cause for despair.
Today's final prayer to God will ask that we may continue in that holy fellowship [the Church], and do all such good works as Thou hast prepared for us to walk in. That's what the future is like: a prepared path of deeds to be walked in. We walk through a calendar that commemorates the life of Christ, and is dated from His birth; and within it we reënact His deathless life--not only in these Eucharistic rites, but constantly, all week long, by suffering as He bore suffering and walking through actions which resemble, a little, His actions. Lived like that, our lives are not merely living in time: we are also living in the eternal life of God. Lived like that, we are not wholly consumed, our moments are not lost, but are gathered up in the unblinking gaze of God. The terrible tick-tick-tick of escaping life is staunched; and time is no longer our enemy.
THIS YEAR 2000, although it is in fact not the first year of a new millennium, whatever they try to tell you, is something more important: it is a Holy Year. In origin Holy Years are a mediæval wheeze, invented to make money and to allow the faithful, who couldn't go on pilgrimage to Palestine once the Crusades were lost, to go on pretend pilgrimages in Rome instead. But that doesn't stop this Holy Year being useful to us. This one is to be, declares the Pope, primarily a year for readjustment and recover: that is, to recover the ancient pattern of Christian order in our lives and in the life of the Church and world. The last century has been, very obviously, a century of loss, but theres nothing to stop the coming century being an age of restoration, of the old made new again; and it may as well begin now, with repentance, renunciation and rediscovery: à la recherche du temps perdu!
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost: AMEN.