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Tuesday, April 04, 2006
High Time
John 12:20-33
John tells us "some Greeks" tried to have a meeting with Jesus, at the very Jewish festival of Passover. His reaction was enthusiastic, to say the least. This, he said, was the moment he'd been waiting for from the first day he went public. Make you curious? Then...
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The old saying says, "The Greeks have a word for it."
Take, for instance, the matter of time, which has two words.
Chronos is ordinary tick-tock time, precisely measured by clocks and calendars. Kairos, on the other hand, means a special moment in time -- your day of opportunity, your hour of decision.
Here's an example of the two "times" at work.
A pelican swept gracefully across the water, mere inches above the waves. I watched intently, forgetting for the moment all about the bird's strange combination of physical features. I drifted into a zone of appreciation for Beauty's way of catching us by surprise -- transforming the least likely candidate sometimes into an icon worthy of worship.
That this epiphany happened at 3:27 p.m. on a Tuesday is absolutely true. And irrelevant by a country mile. While the clock kept ticking, I was lost in the moment. And that's the difference between chronos time and kairos time.
When two of Jesus' disciples tug his sleeve and tell him he has some unusual visitors, his answer translates fairly well into cowboy movie lingo. "Okay, boys, it's high time. Let's get packing!"
For 11 chapters, John's Gospel teased the reader along with Jesus frequently saying, "My hour has not yet come." Whatever was going on, he wasn't ready to do his main Messianic thing. Not yet. Not ahead of God's timing.
Now he says it is indeed God's kairos time. The moment for God's Son to be glorified.
Yay!
But then he complicates things. By saying the way he'll get the glory is by letting himself die. Dead as a doornail. Or, in his words, dead like a seed. You get a good harvest of grain, he says, by letting seeds die, planting them in the dirt, hoping against hope they'll sprout up into new life.
Then another complication. If you like what you see in Jesus, want to follow his ways, then you also have to let yourself die. Not like Jonestown, drinking the Koolaid in unison because the Master says so. But like Calvary, where the Master relinquished control of his own life for the sake of others. And for God's sake.
Easter tells us there's so much more life on the other side of that kind of death. Dead to self, but alive to God! Call it abundant life!
The springtime clock ticks on and on, in daylight saving time for now. Each day recorded on the calendar grows a little longer, a bit fuller with bright warm light.
In the midst of all that, don't forget to stop and look and listen for signals of splendor. Keep tuned into kairos, and major in opportune moments.
Time is too short for anything else.
posted by Jack Buckley at
10:41 AM
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