"‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty."
Revelation 1:8
If you didn't know this about me already, I'm a fan of the British Sci-Fi series, Dr. Who. It's about a very old and very benevolent time-traveling alien, who has a basically human form, and invites one or two earthly followers at a time to travel with him throughout space and time, battling powerful and evil entities, and taking on various missions of righteousness. Oh, and by the way, "The Doctor", whose proper name is not to be shared or spoken aloud, every so often "dies" and undergoes a process called "regeneration," whereby he takes on a brand new body (and, conveniently enough, can then be played by a younger actor.)
If some or all of this plot line sounds familiar to you, you're not alone. If every person of faith received royalties from every film or TV show that "borrows" biblical stories or themes, we'd never need to pass the plate again! In this vein, you might want to check out this video later.
But my recent mini-obsession with The Doctor has gotten me thinking about time, and particularly, about how important it seems to be to Jesus in the gospels, and yet, how strangely time seems to move when it comes to Jesus' life...
I'll give you a classic example that scrambled my little brain pretty well when I was a teenager. Our creeds say that after dying on the cross, Jesus "descended into the dead" or "into hell", depending on how you translate it. And all four gospels attest that Jesus rose again on the following Sunday. And yet, on Good Friday, from the cross, Jesus tells the penitent thief, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’ (emphasis mine).
I remember asking my Dad, also a Lutheran Pastor, about this one Easter afternoon, after a particularly long Holy Week. "So how did that work?" I asked, "Did he just, you know, drop the guy off in heaven, and then go down to hell, or what?"
As I remember it, my dad made an attempt at an answer, involving not taking any individual text too literally, and focusing on the meaning behind it, but I'm sure he was thinking, "I just hope someday you have a kid who asks you this kind of smart-alecky question after your busiest week of the year."
I remember talking about this with a pretty literally-minded Seventh Day Adventist once, and he had an interesting solution: "It's all about where you place the comma."
See, in Greek, there are no commas, so what in most English translations comes through as "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise", becomes, "Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in Paradise." So it's the promise, not the fulfillment, that happens on Good Friday. Rather like the subtle grammatical shift where "Let's eat Grandma!" becomes "Let's eat, Grandma!" Good save, punctuation. Grandma thanks you.
And I think one of those two explanations are where I'd leave it, but for a couple more interesting pieces from scripture:
*The very beginning of Jesus' ministry, where he says, The Kingdom of God has come near, which his hearers would have taken to mean that the age of oppressive earthly kingdoms was coming to an end and God was taking charge, right there and then.
*The transfiguration, where the disciples go up the mountain and encounter a Jesus who looks for all the world like Jesus after his resurrection, hanging out with Moses and Elijah (who Jews at the time believed would be a harbinger of the Messianic age and the final judgment), yet Jesus orders them not to tell anyone until he has, in fact, been raised.
*The fact that in all 3 synoptic gospels, Jesus speaks very openly and clearly about future events, including his own death and resurrection (multiple times).
*An interesting little verse in John's gospel where Jesus says, take courage; I have conquered the world!’ Not "will conquer," but "have conquered." This comes in the Maundy Thursday story, almost three full chapters before Jesus proclaims "It is finished" from the cross.
The point of all this, if you can believe it, is not just that the gospel writers all needed a good copy editor (although I'll readily allow that such a person might have been useful). I think there is a very intentional way in which Jesus' story is told, which probably comes from the experience of the first Christians, that in the life of Jesus, and especially in the times nearer to his cross and resurrection, time simply didn't seem to work the same way. The linear thinking of "first 'A' happened, then 'B', then 'C' ..." did not really apply.
And this collapse of linear time in proximity to Jesus kind of changes the way one views Christian spirituality. Heaven becomes less a question of "where?" than a question of "when", to which the classic answer is every single moment: both right now and also the future, both "already" and "not yet." The story of Jesus' life, and the spiritual movement that flowed out of it, becomes less a historical event in a concrete and unreachable past, but a moment of grace that is vitally connected to every moment, able to reach us any time we are open to it...especially when we gather with others who are also open. The future reign of God, when sickness gives way to healing and all will eat and be satisfied, reaches backward into our own time.
The practice of following Jesus is an act of time travel. In our baptism we are linked to the reality of Jesus' death and resurrection, as though we have gone through it ourselves. In Communion we are connected to Jesus' last supper with his disciples by more than historic memory, and we're connected to the final heavenly banquet by more than wishful thinking, but both happen right now by the reality of his promised presence. When we feed and heal others as Jesus did, it's not a reenactment: it's time travel, back to the moment of creation when God saw the abundant earth and said, "That is GOOD!" and to the moment of fulfillment when all will indeed be good again. It's letting God open up the unique window of this moment in history, that the presence of heaven might pour in from the beginning and from the end: from the Alpha and the Omega.
It's no wonder the gospel writers, and probably the original oral traditions, were a bit muddled when it came to Jesus' "time line." They were dealing with a time traveler: a man who remembers what life could have been, and who knows what it shall be again. An "alien," if you like, in the sense that he's human in a way that all the rest of humanity forgot how to be. A teacher. A healer. Dare I say...a "Doctor"?
Enjoy your travels in time, my friends.
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