The Last Hour

Children, it is the last hour.  1 John 2:18

Coming only a day after the start of Daylight Savings Time, perhaps the title of this post should be "The Lost Hour"!  It's humbling to be reminded twice a year that "time" is both an artificial social construct (dependent on whatever laws political authorities decide to impose and enforce) and a natural phenomenon (dependent on the orbits and revolutions of planets).  I can change my clocks, but my body still somehow keeps its own schedule...

That being said, after wrestling my boys to bed an hour before their bodies told them it was sleepy-time, I collapsed on the couch to catch the last few minutes of the new Cosmos re-make on Fox. I don't remember much about the original, but I've been a big fan of Carl Sagan since his novel Contact was made into one of my favorite movies of the '90s (back when Christie and I could still find the time, money, and wakefulness to actually enjoy the cinema!).

Anyway, the show ended with an illustration of "cosmic time" in which the entire history of the universe, starting with the Big Bang, up until this present moment in the year 2014 Anno Domini is condensed into a single day. It's a neat little trick for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it helps me better understand 2 Peter 3:8 -- "Now, dear friends, do not let this one thing escape your notice, that a single day is like a thousand years with the Lord and a thousand years are like a single day."

If you believe in "cosmic time", then in this illustration it's billions and billions of years in a single day, but the point is still the same: perceptions of time are fundamentally relative to one's perspective!

According to the Cosmos version of the "cosmic time hour" I saw on my TV last night, Jesus was born 5 seconds ago. Now, that isn't a literal 5 seconds.  That is "5 seconds" relative to the entirety of "cosmic time" conceived of as a single day.  But it's fun to look at it that way.  For one thing, it reminds me that the earthly life of the historical Jesus, with which much of my own faith connects, is just a moment passed.  Or, as Jesus preached in the Gospels, the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus embodied on earth really is "near".  Repent and believe the good news!

In Scripture, and probably throughout much of Christian history, the problem of time has been conceived in the opposite direction.  Instead of celebrating how close we are to Jesus (both to his first coming in the past and to his second coming in the future), the historical record seems to contain a whole lot of angst about how far away we are.  That passage from Peter quoted above is one such instance -- he's trying to reassure believers who felt that they were having to wait too long a time for Jesus to come back. And it's a somewhat cliched complaint nowadays to claim that the Bible is "outdated" because it is so old.

And then there's John, who writes with utter conviction that it is now the last hour. And, as of now, that last hour has lasted around 2000 years.  That is one long hour! To make things longer still, we have no idea how much longer the last hour will last. It's mind-blowing. Just like the "cosmic time" illustration, 2000 years may be only a few seconds into the start of the last hour. Or it may be that the end of the hour is only a few actual seconds away.

I don't know how that makes you feel.  I'm not even sure how I feel about it.  But Scripture seems pretty clear that we are going to have to figure out how to live in the tension.  It is the last hour.

I've been told that the perception of imminent death has a tendency to radically reorient one's priorities and values in life. I'd like to say I'm fortunate that I've never been in a position to experience that.  But then again, perhaps my values and priorities are in such need of reorientation that I shouldn't be so thankful for the omission. Perhaps I (and those around me) would be better off if I did believe I had only a few months, weeks, days, hours to live. Maybe then I'd finally become the kind of person I'd always hoped I'd be.

Maybe that is the point. Maybe Scripture teaches us that it is the last hour in order to encourage us to reevaluate our priorities. We hear it said all the time, in various ways: "Live as if it is your last day on earth!"  John just ups the stakes.  Forget about the last day: it is the last hour!

Of course, the last hour is itself a relative term. In Scripture it always presupposes that something will happen after the last hour. In thinking about how to live this last hour, a whole lot depends on what I think will happen to me (and to the rest of the cosmos) when time is up.