THE MEANING OF TIME (PART IV)

Thoughts on the meaning of time, Part IV (read Part 3 here)

The true meaning of time is rooted in agriculture and the agricultural metaphor. The acts of God commemorated in the Old Covenant were all linked to the cycles of planting and harvesting. Redemption itself is describe in terms of agriculture. St. Paul says that “Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 15:20). This refers to the offering of the first sheaf of grain that was the promise of more to come.

I once heard a Bible teacher say that Jesus used agricultural metaphors because he lived in an agrarian world and that we should used metaphors that pertain the world we live in. Usually, this would be metaphors related to the market. But there is something essentially false about this assertion. Jesus used agricultural metaphors because the world God made, rooted as it is in cycles of planting and harvesting, is described and understood more accurately in terms of agriculture.

This is kind of a big deal. Approaches to ministry and prayer in our time are often deeply informed by the market metaphor and its sense of time. In the market, we advertise to get customers to choose our product. The market metaphor leads to the pursuit of short term excitement but often lacks long term impact; the exciting religious product quickly gives way to the next exciting “thing.” The church, like the company, must continually produce something new to attract new customers.

Time experienced as a movement from the Memorial Day sale to the Labor Day sale to the Black Friday sale to the New Year’s sale is a very different sense of time than time lived in the cycle of planting, cultivating, and harvesting a crop. The market sense of time is one of perpetual short term excitement and the perpetual discarding of the old for the new. The agricultural sense of time is one of faithful and persevering labor to plant, water, fertilize, prune, and weed with the long term goal of producing fruit.

The big deal point is that life in Christ is like agriculture, but people are accustomed to equating it with the market. Thus, rather than experiencing time as faithful labor in prayer that works toward the long term goals of virtue, holiness, and resurrection, time tends to be experienced as the pursuit of some “spiritual” thing that promises to make us feel better now. The truth that the short term “feel good” thing does not produce anything real in the long term is the source of our growing societal despair. We’ve abandoned agricultural faith for market faith. We keep looking for the product (the snake oil?) that will cure all. After being disappointed so many times, despair begins to take root.

Advent tells us to “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” In our time, the necessary repentance requires a renunciation of a market based faith and a return to an agricultural faith—because that’s what genuine faith is. God has planted his Holy Spirit within us in baptism. We receive this gift in the good soil of our hearts through faith (cf. Luke 8:15). This seed of the Spirit grows as it is fed and nourished by the Sacrament, by the word of God, by prayer, and by the ministry of the other members of the Body (cf. Eph. 4:16). It requires a commitment to  doing good works. It requires constant vigilance against the assault of the enemy who plants tares (cf. Matt. 13:27-28). It requires continual growth in repentance, as the Holy Spirit opens our eyes to see what is amiss in our hearts more clearly, and it requires a continual growth in our experience of God’s grace, of God’s love for us exactly as we are.

The framework for the life of prayer in the church year is agricultural. It cannot be made to fit into the logic of the market. We must commit to faithful and habitual behaviors over long  periods of time if we want to produce anything real. But there is really good news here. If we will commit to faithful and habitual behaviors for the long term—to pray with the church through the weeks and seasons of the year—the fruit of good works and holiness will grow in us (cf. James 5:7-8).

Faithful labor in prayer and the growth of new life in us will move us away from despair and fill us with hope. Hope is not merely an article of "belief." Hope is an inner longing, planted in us by God. In our experience of time we are constantly tasting and growing into the union with God that we will one day experience in full. Hope is the inner longing for that fulfillment and the inner assurance that God will bring it to pass (cf. Romans 5:3-3). He who planted new life in us will complete his harvest as we persevere in faith and faithfulness (cf. Gal. 6:9, Phil. 1:6). The words of the Thanksgiving/Advent hymn summarize this hope:

Come, ye thankful people, come, Raise the song of harvest home;
All is safely gathered in, Ere the winter storms begin;
God our Maker doth provide For our wants to be supplied;
Come to God’s own temple, come, Raise the song of harvest home.

All the world is God’s own field, Fruit unto His praise to yield;
Wheat and tares together sown, Unto joy or sorrow grown;
First the blade, and then the ear, Then the full corn shall appear:
Grant O harvest Lord that we, Wholesome grain and pure may be.

For the Lord our God shall come, And shall take His harvest home;
From His field shall in that day All offenses purge away;
Give His angels charge at last In the fire the tares to cast;
But the fruitful ears to store In His garner evermore.

Even so, Lord, quickly come, Bring Thy final harvest home;
Gather Thou Thy people in, Free from sorrow, free from sin,
There, forever purified, In thy presence to abide;
Come, with all thine angels come, Raise the glorious harvest home.