Redeemer Central | The Collective | Single Entry | let the Sabbath be our great cathedral, let the Sabbath be our exodus

let the Sabbath be our great cathedral, let the Sabbath be our exodus

Joshua Thompson

16/05/10

a brief summary of time and its relevance to the christian

There is a distinct problem with time, with two principal complaints. Either there is never enough time, for example when spending time with loved ones, or that there is too much of it, for instance ‘that job’ where the hours drag on.

Yet as moderns, we have seen to ‘fix’ this problem by way of technological manipulation, such as ready meals to save time on cooking or social networking to keep in touch with friends and family with the least expenditure of the clock. Yet even this still leaves us lacking, things we never get around to but keep promising ourselves to make time to do it, getting round to catching up with those old friends, reading that book. No matter what time saving devices technology gives us we never seem to really get the better of it. We are on the back foot.
We have a constant hostility with time, a daily struggle to overcome it. When moments arrive they disappear into the past in an instant becoming just a memory and things we anticipate never seem to come around soon enough. The present however is just an infinitesimal blip sandwiched between things that have been and things that are yet to come. C.S. Lewis comments in his allegorical work ‘the screwtape letters’ that an unhealthy relationship with time is one of the cardinal inhibitors to our walk of faith. We can be stuck stupor of reminiscence in the past or we can stunt ourselves by obsessively awaiting the future. Yet the present, that constantly shifting period, is the great reflection of eternity, where we are focused not on doing but on being.

As Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel argued, we cannot solve this problem of time with the conquest of space. We can only prevail over this problem by setting it apart, consecrating it, making a cathedral of it.

Yet despite our failings to dominate the realm of time, we have an incredible capacity to manipulate and master the realm of space. Our relationship with space is easier to handle than time. Both function in different ways and both inhabit different existences. Space is the sphere of the immanent (agronomy bound by biological processes that can be observed and measured) and we can feel in charge of this realm.

Yet time works very differently, and we relate to it via a clock. Nevertheless this is just an attempt to reduce time to a mechanical process, but as mentioned earlier the conquest of time is not resolved through bringing the realm of time into the realm of space. In spite of our splitting, dissecting and grouping we neither fully understand time nor own it. Reducing time to a clock is reducing it to a spatial process which is in a sense warping the way we relate to it. Time is a whole undividable entity - a reflection of eternity.

There is no geographical fixed position within time as there is in space. Whether we occupy a moment of time we occupy all of it, either the present or the eternal, we are in time, its whole history and future. In the realm of space we occupy all of what we stand in, but with time we occupy time in its entire jurisdiction. You can’t have the whole of space in one place, but you have the whole of time in one place.

Christ is God and belongs to eternity, and Christ is a man and belongs to space (even in his glorified state). The two spheres of reality are integrated into this one person, without opposition, fully integrated and fully cooperative. Our relationship to time and space has become somewhat distorted but God has incorporated both in the incarnation of the son of God.

As Heschel states “even pantheistic philosophy is a religion of space”. Every other form of religious philosophy outside of the Judaeo-Christian strain reduces time and eternity to space. Pagan worship is primarily about space, bringing the transcendent realm into the physical realm through idols of gods.

Yet as moderns we believe the clock has solved the problem of time, but it has actually abstracted it. Before the clock time was determined by the seasons and the sun and nature. Going to bed when the sun goes down, getting up when the sun comes up. The clock gave us independence from the sun, but made us prisoners to the mechanical dissecting of time. The clock has warped our interpretation and how we relate to time, resulting in an abstract relationship. The numbers are imposed on reality. We force ourselves into the chronology of time, reducing time to a process. The more chronologically focussed we become the less we feel in control of time and end up having not enough time to do what we want and in fact be who we really are.

Yet there is holiness within time that we need to discover. But this will never happen if we try to reduce time to space, profaning it and bringing it under our control. Entering the holy cathedral of time is to let go of our control over it.

The bible is much more concerned with the realm of time than the realm of space, with history rather than geography. Christianity is more about the event in time than the place, but that’s not to say that place doesn’t matter. Take the last supper for example – “drink this in remembrance of me”, the Eucharist is to participate within time – this allows us to enter a Holy ‘cathedral’ within time, to participate within it.

The whole of creation is good, but not all is holy. There are certain things that God designates as holy. And God has made the Sabbath holy, a place in time where we can be released of the struggles of the world, the struggles of the past, and the struggles of the future. The Jewish Sabbath is the best way to understand the cathedral within time. The first thing to be made holy in creation was rest.

Sabbath belongs to time, it’s a holy time, and it’s a cathedral within time, a holy moment. Its essence is detached from space. The Israelites may have been stripped of land and possessions but they were never stripped of their Sabbath. It was a place where the Jew entered an eternal now. The Sabbath was a weekly exodus from work struggle and tension. It is a freedom into rest; to cease from our doing and enter our being.

You can’t encounter God if you are living in the future waiting for something to happen, or submerging yourself in nostalgia and living in the past. They are nothing more than brain states. You encounter God in the present and by living in the present. Yet that is not to say that we can’t draw on things from the past for the hope for the future. I’m a great believer in remembering and drawing on tradition. But in this covenant Christ is the new Sabbath, and we rest in him.

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