Moving Beyond the Clock
Living Freely in a World Consumed by Hurry
December 10, 2024 | By Yoska Guta TD ‘25
image description: setting sun
There are 60 seconds in each minute, 60 minutes in each hour, 24 hours in each day, 7 days in each week, 52 weeks in each year, and an undefined number of years in all of creation’s existence. Long before any of us even understood how to count time, life has worked this way. Over the years, however, humans have increasingly turned to technology as a means of controlling the patterns of time, especially as it has become more essential to our functioning.
There was a point in history when people told time according to the rising and setting of the sun and the movement of the stars. Today, however, many of us track it on our wrists and carry it in our pockets. From phone alarms to monstrously crowded GCals that allow us to add, extend, and delete slots as we see fit, we have built a habit of living within time and orienting our lives around wrangling it.
On college campuses, where time is seen as an especially scarce commodity, our hyper-fixation on controlling it is even more evident. Although classes have almost entirely returned to in-person instruction after COVID-19, rather than sitting through a scheduled 75-minute lecture, many students continue to opt for recordings that allow them to watch lessons at their preferred time and speed. Indeed, it is even becoming too difficult for some students to find time to take notes or complete readings, opting instead to have AI software like ChatGPT analyze texts or concepts and break them down into bulleted lists that can be digested at a fraction of the speed as can their assigned course material.
Each of these time manipulation methods foment our desire to maintain control and to reject, or even despise, patience and contentment. Yet, despite our common tendency to forget how little control we have over time, we have all entered into a world with pre-existing temporal constraints. In the same way that we do not control the rising of the sun or the blooming of spring’s flowers, we cannot control when we are born, when we die, or even—to an extent—how the in-between plays out. No matter how in control we may feel, in reality, we cannot speed time up or slow it down; but, does that mean that we are trapped within it, and, if so, how should we act in light of this realization?
Christianity posits that God has not only made time as a part of Creation but that He has also provided a tangible, living example of how humans ought to operate within it. The Gospel narratives found within the New Testament recount the life and ministry works of Jesus, the Son of God, who entered creation in human form with a crucial purpose: reconciling a broken and sinful people to Himself through self-sacrifice. Jesus’ earthly life, Gospel ministry, and eternal promise are all littered with implications for how humans should relate to and understand time.
Within the Christian faith, Jesus is not merely a revered figure but is understood to be God Himself—the One through whom all things in creation were made. Therefore, it is of immense significance that the Creator of Heaven and Earth would willfully choose to leave His throne of glory and limitless power to be made subject to His own creation, particularly through time. In the fullness of His humanity, Christ experienced what it meant to grow up as a child—to obey His parents and undergo all the Jewish coming-of-age rites, despite knowing what great power He possessed as God. He submitted in complete humility and patience to the human experience for the sake of a greater purpose.
For those of us who are anxious about our future or who feel that our ambitions and career aspirations are not coming to pass quickly enough, Jesus challenges us. His purpose—living an earthly life to die a painful death so that He could rise up and save all of humankind—is far greater than any of ours. Yet, as Philippians 2:6-8 tells us, He did not consider His equality with God something to be grasped; but, in humility, He took on the nature of a servant and was found in the likeness of human beings. Jesus did not use His divine nature to circumvent suffering or create a path of maximal convenience and efficiency, and neither should we.
In spite of always knowing what was ahead of Him, whether the pain of the cross or the glory that lay beyond it, Jesus patiently waited nearly 4,000 years before entering creation and nearly 33 more years before ultimately fulfilling His earthly purpose. Along the way, He frequently reminded those around Him, contrary to what many of us would say about ourselves, that His time was not yet. But when His time came, He faithfully endured the cross to the point of death, being buried for three days before His glorious moment of resurrection came to pass. In His patience and submission, Jesus directly opposes our instinct to speed life up or manipulate systems to our liking.
For all the control we believe we have over time, somehow, many of us are still unsatisfied with it. When it comes to school or all the years of professional training that might be ahead of us, time is not moving fast enough. Yet, when it comes to sleep or moments of leisure, it moves too quickly. We know we should not procrastinate, and yet many of us spend a considerable amount of our days regretting our misuse of time. Not to mention, for each of us, our time here on earth will also have a final limit in death—a limit we often try to evade but will eventually be confronted with.
In contrast to our uneasy and restless relationship with time, however, Christ both willfully surrendered to and freely lived within it. In John 11, Mary and Martha sent word to Jesus from Bethany informing Him that their brother Lazarus was sick and needed healing. Upon hearing this, Jesus intentionally decides to wait two extra days before visiting their family, telling His disciples: “Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.”[1] Upon His arrival, Jesus is met by the two sisters who both say to Him “Lord…if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”[2] Likewise, their Jewish relatives, upon seeing Jesus weep alongside the sisters over Lazarus, ask “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” [3]
Jesus' delay led those around Him to question His intentions and abilities. It seemed, by human standards, illogical that Jesus would purposefully wait for Lazarus to die before coming to heal him. Failing to see the greater heavenly purpose, Lazarus’ relatives concluded that Jesus’ delay was evidence of His inability and insufficiency. Yet unbeknownst to them, Jesus chose this route to reveal His perfect sufficiency and ability.
That is, although Jesus submitted Himself to the limitations of time as a human being, in His divinity, Christ still possessed power over time, so much so that even death did not have the final say in His presence. For those of us who are immensely attached to efficiency or deeply fearful of missing our big moment, Jesus' decision to delay seems unthinkable. Yet, here too, Jesus challenges us. Rather than being enslaved by the pressure to maximize our productivity in the consuming pursuit of success, we are called to slow down, to think about what part of ourselves we lose in coveting time, and to remember the example that Jesus set.
At the end of His earthly ministry, Jesus commissions His disciples to carry on His work by spreading the good news of the Gospel to the whole world. This responsibility to be the vehicle by which the early church would be established was a high calling. But rather than urging them to pack their belongings, split up the countries amongst themselves, and disperse to various regions, Jesus immediately follows this commission with a command to wait: “Stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.” [4]
For many of us, waiting for things that have set deadlines is hard enough, think of the release of college admissions decisions and the anxiety that we all felt for something that we knew was coming. But imagine if these dates and times were unknown. Imagine if there were no alumni or current students to inform us of the potential college experiences that await us at the end of the application season. For Jesus' disciples, this was the kind of waiting they had—one that lacked both a precise end date and a detailed explanation of what was to come.
In this modern day and age, where technology and other means have given us a greater sense of control over our day, such a command to wait and remain would be very difficult. This call to indefinite waiting is the ultimate challenge to our attachment to time.
Today, this call to indefinite waiting is for the second coming of Christ. We know that He has gone to prepare a place for us in Heaven—a place He will bring us to at the end of time. But, “concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of Heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.” [5] As those living on the other side of resurrection, we can trust that this promise of eternity is a sure thing. And yet, in the mystery of it all, we are also being called to an indefinite faith. But will the Son of Man find such faith on earth when He returns? Or will we, having minimized faith to a series of scheduled times and predictable moments, have grown weary and hopeless?
The desire to live a fulfilling and never-ending life, free of pain and grief, is a natural part of the human experience. After all, death is the antithesis to life. But the fulfillment we so desperately seek does not lie on the other side of a sped-up lecture or an ambitious career aspiration. Our relentless pursuit of maximal productivity and purpose is misinformed by our failure to recognize that there is an end to this thing called time. If we are not careful, continually feeding our insatiable desires for efficiency and immediate gratification—through developing more systems to eliminate the slow, prolonged, or mundane moments of life—will leave us ill-prepared for what awaits us at the end of time: an eternity where neither schedules nor deadlines nor customizable playback settings will mean anything to our existence.
In light of this, how then do we live in the present with an eternity in mind where time ceases to matter?
By directing our attention to Christ, who exemplified this way of life.
1. John 11:14-15.
2. John 11:21; 31.
3. John 11:37.
4. Luke 24:49.
5. Matthew 24:36.