Each year, as the period of Lent approaches, I turn to John’s poignant account of Jesus’ last supper with his disciples. The pace slows as the apostle devotes almost a quarter of his Gospel to this one intimate gathering of Jesus’ closest friends.
The contrast in moods between Jesus and his disciples could hardly be greater. Earlier that week the disciples had been joined by a throng of people shouting “Hosanna!” and waving palm branches, eager to crown Jesus king of Israel. Little wonder they felt confused by Jesus’ somber tone a few days later. After a puzzling display of foot-washing, Jesus spoke of an imminent betrayal and announced that soon he would be leaving them.
Often Jesus had scolded them for missing his message. This time he answered their questions with limitless patience. He called them “my children,” and said, “Where I am going, you cannot come.” Mystified, they heard him declare, “But very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away.” How could it possibly be good for their leader, the one they accepted as Messiah, to abandon them? “We don’t understand what he is saying,” they murmured among themselves.
“In this world you will have trouble,” Jesus acknowledged, in one of history’s great understatements. Then came a ringing declaration, his final announcement to his bewildered followers: “But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
As a writer, I stop and reflect on Jesus’ choice of tense. Wouldn’t “I will overcome the world” be more appropriate? After all, a detachment of soldiers may have been buckling on armor and polishing weapons at that very moment, for the betrayer Judas had left the meal with dark plans in store for Jesus.
This sends me on a search for other striking references to time in the Bible:
- A psalmist writes, “Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” (Psalm 90:2)
- Revelation mentions “the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world.” (Revelation 13:8)
- Peter explains that Christ “was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake.” (1 Peter 1:20)
- Peter again: “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” (2 Peter 3:8)
- Paul introduces himself as “a servant of God… in the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time.” (Titus 1:2)
- Paul assures the Ephesians that “he chose us in him before the creation of the world.” (Ephesians 1:4)
Jesus himself, in the prayer that ends John’s account of the last supper, reminisced, “And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.”
Next, I came across a vigorous online debate on whether God is truly timeless. The debate predates the internet, stretching back at least as far as St. Augustine, who devoted Book 11 of The Confessions to a discussion of time. Someone asked Augustine, “What was God doing before creation?” Augustine responded that since God invented time along with the created world, such a question is nonsense, and merely betrays the time-bound perspective of the questioner. Before time there is only eternity, and eternity for God is a never-ending present.
From there, I stumbled across esoteric explanations of Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which connects time and space. Let me try to illustrate how the two are related.
Time, we are now told, depends on movement and the observer’s relative position. Consider a simple example. When I glance in the sky outside my window at 3:12 in the afternoon, I see a bright star, the sun, that hangs in space some 93 million miles away. Light actually left that star 500 seconds ago and traveled at the rate of 186,000 miles per second to reach me. As an observer on earth, I look into the sky at 3:12 p.m., although I dimly realize that I am viewing the astral results of what took place at 3:04 p.m. earth time. If the sun suddenly vanished in a sneak attack by a voracious black hole, I would not know it for eight minutes. Then the sky would darken and I would cry “The sun is gone!” and prepare for extinction.
As a thought experiment, now imagine a large Person—I mean very large, one with a legspan of at least 93 million miles. This Person stands in our solar system with his left foot planted firmly on earth and his right foot (asbestos-wrapped) resting on the sun. When this Person stamps his right foot, immediately solar flares shoot out in all directions and the sun belches gases. Eight minutes later, we on earth will notice the dramatic change in the sun.
Yet we are trapped on earth. The very large Person exists partially on earth and partially on the sun; his consciousness spans both. Although he is partly standing on earth, the Person has knowledge of the stomping right foot eight minutes in advance of anyone else on earth. A question: “What time is it for the large Person?” Time depends on the location in space.
Take a further mental leap and imagine a Being as large as the universe. The omnipresent Being exists simultaneously on earth and on a star in the Andromeda galaxy billions of miles away. If a star explodes in that galaxy, this Being takes note of it immediately, yet will also “see” it from the viewpoint of an observer on earth millions of years later as if it has just happened. Right now, as I write, space telescopes such as the Hubble and the James Webb are receiving “real-time” reports from events in the universe that occurred billions of years ago.
The analogy is inexact, for it traps such a Being in space even as it frees it from time. But it may illustrate how our “first A happens, then B happens” conception of time demonstrates the limited perspective of our planet. God, the creator of both time and space, can view what happens—and has happened—on Earth in a way we can only guess at, and never fully comprehend.
At a single glance God knows what the world is about, and how it ends. But we time-bound creatures have only the most primitive manner of understanding: we can let time pass. Not until history has run its course will we grasp how, in Paul’s phrase, “all things work together for good.” In Romans 8 the apostle encompasses both time and space in a soaring declaration: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Perhaps Jesus had thoughts along the same line when he made the startling claim, “I have overcome the world” … mere hours before his arrest.
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