Some years ago I was intrigued by an article in the journal Theology, entitled: Life’s Teatime and the Sense of an Ending. It began as follows:- If one’s lifetime is thought of as a day, between getting up and going to bed, then I suppose I am approaching teatime. There begins to be a sense of limited time for all the things I might want to do, and that I need to take new bearings within a new perspective, one that derives not so much from my beginning as my ending. Instead of my life being a piece of work that I can take all the time I need to finish, I am beginning to work to a deadline, in a very literal sense.’.
The article went on to draw on Frank Kermode’s book, The Sense of an Ending, which contends that just as the great eschatological fictions of world literature have made use of the concept of an apocalypse a grand conclusion giving a necessary pattern to historical time a sense of beginning, middle and end, without which there is no meaning so too, in more modern times, the same pattern has been applied within literature to individual lives. We need the sense of an end, in order to give purpose and direction to what would otherwise be an experience of mere successiveness. This may not be so apparent while we are still young, with so many options still open, so many choices, so many opportunities to shape our lives, but by tea-time, when so much of the story has been written, we begin to sense increasingly the need for an ending which will make sense of it all.
There is perhaps a sense in which God is like an author, who has created his characters, but must then let them act in accordance with the characters they have been given, before bringing the story to a satisfactory conclusion. The metaphor of God as author can be pressed too hard, but it does have the capacity to speak of God as originator; as the sustainer of something that both depends on him and yet represents a world of choice; and as the one who holds responsibility for the ending, and thus for the meaning.’
The fictional story of Daniel in the lions den has a nice clear structure, with an ending that draws the tale to a thoroughly satisfactory conclusion. Daniel’s enemies plot to bring about his downfall, they entrap the king who is bound to uphold the laws of the Medes and the Persians which cannot be changed, but the power of the god whom Daniel serves is demonstrated as his angel stops the mouth of the lions, and in the end it is the enemies of Daniel and Daniel’s god who perish in the cruel fashion they had themselves contrived.
The story which Mark tells also ends in a great escape. From the beginning Jesus provokes the opposition of the religious and secular authorities, and he is continually misunderstood even by his closest friends. Cornered by his enemies, he is betrayed by one of his friends and abandoned by all the others, crucified, dead and buried. It looks as if the enemies of Jesus have succeeded where the enemies of Daniel failed, but then at the very last moment, Jesus’ complete trust in his father’s love and power is vindicated as he passes through death to a new risen life. And the dramatic ending reads back into the whole story, even if the women and the other disciples will need to go back to Galilee, back to the beginning, in order to discover the truth about Jesus which only the ending could fully reveal to them.
And what of us? He has risen; he is not here. We believe that Christ rose from the dead, and that we are united to Him in the Spirit by bonds of love just as He was united to His Father by bonds of love which even death could not break. We can therefore be as confident as faith and hope and love can make us, that we too will be raised to join with Him in the life of the world to come. We have read the last page; we know how the story ends. But how does that ending affect our understanding of the beginning, and the middle of our own narrative, as well as the more restricted options left to us in the limited time after tea?
Who or what is the me’ that will go forward into new life? Not my body surely, if by that I mean the by then worn-out bag of skin and bones that I shall probably be glad enough to leave behind. Any of us who have ever visited the undertaker’s to view the body of a friend or relative knows that what we saw there was not the person we had known and loved. They were not there. When I look in the mirror I see only the person I am now, but my identity includes the child and the young man, the father and perhaps one day the grandfather, as well as traces of all the different roles that have fallen to me in public as well as in private. Jim Cotter imagined all this being transferred as it were onto a silicon chip so that all that goes to make up my identity, that real me’, could easily be saved’ as we say when we want to keep something on a computer.
Will all of that go with me? I believe so how else should I be recognisable as me’? What then about the things I wish I hadn’t done, the things I wish I hadn’t said, the choices I wish I hadn’t made? Will they go with me too? According to Aristotle, the Greek tragedian Agathon said that even God cannot change the past’, though it has been suggested that a better translation would be that even God cannot make undone the things that have once been done.’ We cannot pick and choose among the events that have shaped our lives and out identity. Even God cannot make undone the things that we have done, or the things that others have done to us but he can redeem them. We saw a couple of weeks ago how Jesus redeemed Peter’s thrice repeated denial by creating the opportunity for him to affirm his love three times; Jim Cotter movingly suggested last week that when Jesus went down into hell, he might have searched out Judas to redeem him with a kiss. Supremely, on the cross, Jesus redeemed all the evil that the whole world had done to Him and to His Father, and that work of redemption continues to find expression in our lives through the activity of the Holy Spirit.
It is easy to say that God has redeemed time, but what does it mean, in the familiar words of Thomas Ken’s hymn, to redeem thy mis-spent moments past’? His was an early morning hymn Awake my soul and with the sun thy daily stage of duty run’, but even with the whole day before him, the urgency of his call to action derives from the day’s ending:
Improve thy talent with due care;
For the great day thyself prepare.
As I pause to enjoy life’s tea-time, I would like to think there are still some things I can do to improve my talent with due care certainly there are some things I have begun which I should try to finish. At the same time I need to accept that there is now much about my life that I cannot undo or start again in the limited time that is left. That being said, it is not too late for God to redeem the mistakes I have made, the things I wish I hadn’t said or done, not by undoing them, but by applying to them the healing touch of his redeeming love. He is always ready to take that initiative; I need to be ready to respond, ready to co-operate in his initiative if there is something I can do, perhaps more willing that I have been to recognise how dependent I am on what Christ can do for me, if my time and with it my story is to be redeemed. Pace Thomas Ken, it is not I who can redeem my mis-spent moments past, but Christ my Saviour working in me to bring my story to the end which He desires for me.
As tea-time slips past, and my contemporaries, even at my age, begin to pass away, I have to be aware that there may not be as much time left as I would like to think. There is a very proper urgency about Thomas Ken’s injunction to live this day as if thy last’. Those who have faced and come to terms with a life-threatening medical prognosis sometimes discover what it means to enjoy the precious gift of each day without being too distracted by the past or the future. That may be one of the ways in which God teaches us to value the gift of time and to redeem it.
As I stand here to-day I don’t know how I shall get to the end of my story, or how many exciting pages there may yet be to turn, whether of sorrow or of joy. But as I get up from my tea, I face the future with a belief in the resurrection and the life of the world to come. I do believe that my recognisable, true identity is safe in the hands of the God who made me. I may have resisted his direction in the past. I may not have fulfilled the potential he could have fulfilled in me. I am now what I am. But if only I will let him, he can still bring my story to a much better conclusion than I could ever contrive for myself. As Mark is telling us, the ending of the story makes all the difference to its meaning. He has risen; he is not here.