In four days’ time it will be 2009. We return home before then, so we wish you a happy New Year! May you know the Lord’s blessing and strength in your life each day.
Time is a funny thing. Half the population seems to have time to burn, while the other half is always short of time. Yet we all have exactly the same number of hours in each day!
A number of years ago I noticed on the wall of a paper-supplying company a “Rush Job” calendar. I have since seen it in a number of different versions, but the basic principles are the same. The numbers go backwards instead of forwards in each week, since everybody wants their job done yesterday. Weekends are eliminated as being unproductive, so are Mondays when nobody works well. Instead three Fridays are introduced to help with all those jobs needed by Friday. And a Miracle day is introduced because the week’s work could usually do with one. The other effect of numbering each week backwards is to get rid of the usual end-of-month jam.
Have you ever felt you could do with a calendar like that? Unfortunately, it can’t actually be like that at all. It would be an unreal world. Such a calendar can only work in our imagination.
In point of fact, we all have the same time available to us – twenty-four hours in every day. But we have varying amounts of physical and nervous energy, differing skills, different ways of tackling our lives, the habits of a lifetime... Add to that the variety of commitments – job, home, family, community... These affect both the time we need and the time we seem to have at our disposal.
The question, of course, isn’t simply what time we have, but what our priorities are. These will determine how we use our time. All of us have periods when uninvited circumstances cut right across our plans and reshape what we have to do – a disaster, a sickness, a bereavement...
We live in the pressure of our instant world where everything has to happen on the run – with its instant food, instant garbage, instant relationships, instant divorce... And there is a special kind of guilt that our ratty rat-race society lays on us all – a guilt that leads, among other things, to some of the amazing achievements of our time – and to record levels of unemployment, mental disturbances and suicide.
From the standpoint of our world, it is difficult for us to slow down, to stop for long enough to grasp just what had happened in the birth of baby Jesus. We have had Christmas – it was good while it lasted – but a yew year is coming and life must rush on.
Christmas had come and gone and old Simeon went up to the
But day after day, week after week, year after year ground
on. Even at their slower pace of living – life still had to go on! For
centuries now their nation had been suffering badly. Just now it was the
Romans. They had to pay tax to them. They had to carry their soldiers’ packs
without question. And when they went into the
Old Simeon went up to the
He had to pay his taxes like the rest of them. He couldn’t
plead his age if a Roman soldier asked him to carry his pack. He too must have
been conscious of the Roman “big Brother” looking in from the fortress! He is
described as being “a good, God-fearing man... waiting for
Old Simeon went up to the
It had been such a long time – centuries before his birth.
But he knew within himself that the time of fulfilled promises was at hand. He
had received assurance by special revelation that he would see the promised
Messiah. It was an ordinary kind of day in the
“Now, Lord, you have kept your promise, and you may let your
servant go in peace. With my own eyes I have seen your salvation, which you
have prepared in the presence of all peoples: A light to reveal your will to
the Gentiles and bring glory to your people
Then Anna arrived – eighty-four year old Anna! She is described as “a very old prophetess” – a phrase which doesn’t imply that the Jewish authorities acknowledged her prophetic gift! (It’s curious that the footnote in the Good News Bible alerts us to a variant translation making her a widow for eighty-four years – which would make her at least 108! I think it is sufficient for us to go with the text that she was eighty-four years old!)
Anna spent all available time in the
Anna spent her time worshipping God, fasting and praying.
Later we hear of Jesus censuring the scribes and Pharisees for their
hypocritical prayer and fasting – that was for their abuse of what was meant to
be an appropriate way of drawing near to God and preparing oneself for his
will. Evidently there were others too in
So Anna arrives too and gives thanks to God. The time of fulfilment has come. This is the promised one. Quietly, as she meets the others, she tells them about the child.
Simeon was “waiting for
And now the Season has come and gone. We’ve had the “Ho! Ho! Ho!” and now it’s just “Ho, ho!” – that’s that, but so what, we have to get on with life.
Sometimes I feel like shaking people and saying, “Hold on a minute! Don’t you realise what has happened? We can’t just go back to the old life and the old ways! Jesus the Son of God has been born into our human history, born to rescue us from our brokenness, born to set us free! We can’t just shrug him off!”
In the day of wily old Herod and the crafty Pharisees, what was happening was fairly private – shown to Simeon and Anna and a few acquaintances.
But his coming was for you and for me – and for the whole world! His coming was for dealing with the sin problem which has become so endemic in human life. His coming was for giving us purpose, meaning and direction for our life in 2009. His coming was for giving us solid hope in a world whose bewildering change leads so many to despair!
Happy New Year to you! May you travel this year together with the Lord!
© Peter J. Blackburn, Mareeba, 28
December 2009
Except where otherwise noted, Scripture
quotations are from the Good News Bible, © American Bible Society, 1992.
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