“[Jesus] replied, ‘It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority’” (Acts 1:7).
Time is famously allusive, and hard to pin down. It can be calculated in various ways: for instance, a year is how long it takes for the Earth to orbit the sun; a day is the period required for the Earth to rotate on its axis; hours and minutes and seconds can be fixed as subunits of one or the other. An alternative standard fixes the calculation of a second by the measurement of a certain number of oscillations of the cesium atom. Fascinating stuff.
But, apart from the gyrations of planets, suns, and the cesium atom, time also has a human component. We’re creatures of time, and the passage of time is perceived differently by different people; or even differently by the same person. The last few months of episcopal transition have seemed to me to have passed both very quickly, and at a glacial pace. How can that be? How can both things be true at once?
They say that as people get older that time seems to pass more quickly, and that events in the past (even the distant past) seem to have happened just a moment ago. By contrast, a summer’s day seems to hang heavily on a small child who has his whole life before him. Then again a busy person may feel gobbled up by the calendar, and time’s rapid passage. In each case, time is experienced and measured differently by different people.
Our first reading brings Jesus an urgent question concerning time, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6). That’s right: “Is this the time?” In the context of the reading, Jesus has risen from the dead, and is about to depart from the disciples, to return and be seated at the right hand of God. They’re waiting for the gift of the Spirit to come upon them.
It’s a time of crisis, a time of change: which is another way in which human beings perceive time. An era, an epoch, an age: a period of a certain sort that can be distinguished by human beings and characterized in a certain way. The disciples’ urgent question for Jesus is whether this is the time, the period, when the kingdom will be established? That’s the disciples question: “Is this the time?”
“[Jesus] replied, ‘It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority’” (Acts 1:6-7). Here we get a glimpse into the way in which God calculates time, if we can think about it in that way. God, of course, is outside time: time doesn’t pass for God, but all things that ever were or ever will be (as humans calculate them) are eternally present to God. Another way of saying this is that God doesn’t have to wait around. But we can also say that there are times in which God acts. “Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered” (Ps. 68:1), as we said in our psalm today: a prayer for God to take action in our time.
Jesus’ reply to the disciples underscores this truth about time: “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority” (Acts 1:7). We want to know what time it is, but Jesus will not reveal it. The word that he uses here for “time” (chronos) is the New Testament’s word for typical time, the measurement of the sundial or the sundown, in Jesus’ day; or the ticking of the clock in our own. But the word that gets translated as “period” (kairos) is God’s time, the time that is still ahead for us in which God will act.
Kairos is how God figures time, not how we measure it. The disciples urgent question, “Is this the time?”, is one that can’t be answered. When they pose their question, it is certainly forty days after Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, as we calculate time; it certainly is a time of crisis in the life of the Church, a make or break time. But there is no real answer possible for the disciples’ question about the time because the answer is in God’s time. The thing we know about God’s time, is that in that time God will act.
This morning is one of those times, because God is active and present today. Our reading recounts how “Peter, and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James” (Acts 1:13) were all present at the Ascension, along with Mary the mother of the Lord and the other women. All were waiting for the Holy Spirit to come upon them. We too take our place with these earlier followers of Jesus, as we wait and expect God to act in our lives.
God will act as we come forward to the altar rail and receive Christ’s Body and Blood, the effective means of grace given to us this morning. Our confirmands will reaffirm their baptismal vows and receive the gift of the Spirit through the prayer of the congregation and the laying on of the bishop’s hands. We’ll all have the chance to join them in renewing our own vows. We’re stepping into the eternally present moment in which God will act. “Is this the time?” Yes, this is the time and we are the People.