Augustine tells of a vision of seeing a little boy at a beach scooping up the ocean thimbleful by thimbleful and emptying it out on the sand. Then he sees an angel who tells him that this boy will have emptied out the entire ocean long before Augustine has exhausted what can be said about God.
~ Peter Kreeft
Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” And some of the bystanders, hearing it, said, “This man is calling Elijah.” And one of them at once ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine, and put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink. But the others said, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save Him.” And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up His spirit. And at that moment, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened. And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many. When the centurion and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe and said, “Truly this was the Son of God!”
~ When time was overwhelmed by Eternity, in Matthew 27
Oh beloved, it is true.
Eternity tears at our time-worn lives. It is beating against the doors of our nearly impenetrable souls. We, in our in our little lives, with our little phones, with our little problems, and our enormous doubts, think that what we see in front of us is the vista of our existence. Oh, something tells us we are getting it wrong, but we burrow on, heads down, looking at the even smaller lives on our little screens.
But, in doing all of this, we miss the truth. We miss reality. We are running under a lie that was put to open shame nearly 2,000 years ago.
Time has been beaten. It is not even a contest. And, before you think this fool of a writer has gone even too mystical for himself to understand, let’s do a little bit of basic Theology.
One of the basics in our faith is to try to understand the Nature of the G_d we serve. And, this same Being has hundreds of titles, but one of them is perfect for the purpose of this entry: “Avi’ad” (אביעד) in the original language of The Word has this overwhelmingly delicious meaning: Father of eternity.
Let’s make this even more clear. G_d is beyond forever. And even with eternity and infinity themselves, Scale and Scope are meaningless in the attempt to try and measure the shorelessness of this expanse. All language, including Maths, falls short on the shoreline of infinity. No language can reach out even an iota into those waters.
And still, it says that G_d, The Lord Jesus Christ, is the very Progenitor of eternity. He has made this expanse His dwelling place. A nice little cottage, if you will, for The One Who has built it for Himself. And to get where He was going with His plans… It is as though the ‘downsizing’ of G_d had to go through a couple of steps to make it even possible.
So the next step was, as one of the leaders of Church has said, when Jesus became a Man, it was the “entry of eternity into time.” The One larger than even eternity and infinity had taken on a limitation so as to interface with existence. But now, He was taking on an even greater limitation in order to interface with humanity. Time, this tiny little fibre in the fabric of forever, was now the place upon which Majesty was resting – in a frail frame – “held together by habit and skin.”*
But Oh!, the downsizing was not a downgrading. The devil thought it was going to be a place where he could leverage himself up over the infinite and take over the little cottage of eternity, since it seemed to not be fully occupied… But, as liars often experience, they do not understand Truth.
Jesus gave us a clue a little while before His death. He said it quite clearly, but the Truth was hiding in plain sight. He said, “unless a seed falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone. But, if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
Can we see it?
Jesus was the Seed, and we are the fruit. Eternity became finite (for a moment of a young Man’s life), and death broke that seed wide open, bearing the fruit of abundant eternity in the lives of the finite. And we can see this in the passage above. Some things happened in the natural, to give us insight into the truer reality of the Spirit.
The veil in the temple was a separation between the natural world, and the supernatural reality of G_d. His real Presence was in that place, and it was set apart to be experienced only once per year by the selected priest of the order of Levi. And Jesus tore this veil wide open, in the temple, at the moment He let Himself die.
But, as He had said only a little earlier, G_d had no desire to dwell alone with Himself in The Trinity. Oh, it was not that He was anything less by dwelling with Themselves. But rather, due to His very nature – that being even bigger than the tiny construct of infinity and eternity – He knew that His death would bear fruit greater than even eternity could contain.
His death; his tearing Himself open on our behalf, tore time itself to shreds, and brought billions out of time and into eternal Life with The Trinity. Oh yes, it was painful. Oh yes, it was real. Oh yes, it was death itself that had to be invoked to make it happen.
But, with G_d being Himselves, He took what used to be our nemesis, and made it into the deepest of deep-healing medicines. The death of G_d, did more than pay for our very large number of sins. The death of G_d, laid time to waste, and crushed even the platform upon which the devil operates in his temptations of us.
Hopefully this is awakening something in us. When we feel limited by our lives. When we feel the pull of our lusts (which are just temptations to hurry up and get something). When we feel small and unimportant. All of this can be seen for what it really is: a lie. For the Truth most truly is: Eternity has burst out upon the earth, and His Life is now ours. And forever will not be enough to contain it all.
So, are you worn down by this life? Don’t be. It is already over. Eternity has already begun. Tonight is your night. Eternal rejoicing is in order!
If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy…. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. To please God…to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness…to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.
~ CS Lewis, from The Weight of Glory
*Bruce Cockburn
