What time is it?* On Christmas day I want to ask what time is it? Most of you are probably thinking why didn’t someone give him a watch for Christmas. What time is it? We read this morning from the apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians and there he says ‘when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman’ (Gal 4.4). What time is it? Paul says it is the time of Jesus, the Son. We live in a ‘present evil age’ (Gal 1.4) says Paul, but now the time has fully come and God has sent his Son, born of a woman. Into our world, God has interrupted time, and has begun a new time: the time of Jesus. The author of the story enters the story and begins to write a new chapter and give the whole story a new end. The whole of time now finds its meaning in the birth of Jesus.
The phrase ‘the time has fully come’ could mean that everything had happened that needed to happen in order for God to see his Son, God’s plan from the beginning of creation through Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, Ruth and David, Isaiah and Esther reaches its climactic point at this moment: God enters time. The phrase ‘the time has fully come’ could also mean that all that is opposed to God: sin, death, and evil, your time is now up for God has sent his Son; your time is over, the end of sin and the end of death is now in view.
What time is it? It is God’s time; the one who is beyond time, who sees all time – past, present and future – as an eternal now, enters time, adopts it, embraces it, in order that time might be healed, in order that time and those who live in time might share in the eternal life of God. We are those living in the new time of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, and therefore no longer, says Paul, are we bound by the old time, where we were slaves to sin and to the law, where we under the sentence of death. We are now, says Paul, those adopted into God’s time, we are now living in the time Jesus, born of a woman, who is now our brother and we are God’s children.
Christmas announces the beginning of God’s time, the old time is passing away and God’s time is becoming the new time we live by and it all began with the birth of a child to a woman named Mary. Christmas is the beginning of the end, for the coming of Christ is the decisive moment that means we can no longer consider history has just one thing after another: history and future are now focused in Christ.
What time is it? It is the time for joy and grace and truth for light and love and life. The long wait of Advent is over, God has arrived. It is the time for joy and grace and truth for light and love and life because Jesus is the source of all our joy, Jesus is full of grace and truth, Jesus is the light of the world, Jesus is the love of God in the flesh, Jesus is life – life as God intended it to be.
It is the time for joy and grace and truth for light and love and life because of Jesus and as those who celebrate the Christ-child we are Jesus-people; so let joy be our song, let grace and truth be the seasoning for our words, let light fill our hearts and minds, let love – the vulnerable love of Jesus – be our habit and let life of the kind that points towards the Life-giver be our gift; the kind of the gift that remembers that Jesus is for life, not just for Christmas! Amen and Happy Christmas!
* J. Lou Martyn in his Anchor Bible Commentary suggests this is the question that the letter to the Galatians seeks to answer.
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