The Great Jubilee
and the mystery of time

The world is preparing to enter the third millennium. While all types of speculation are rife about the significance of this epochal transition into a new age, Christians must recall that the basis of the novelty of time is founded on the novelty of Christ’s birthday. Scho l ars may debate ad infinitum about the exactitude of the reckoning of the date of Christ’s birth, but in all events the public numeration of the years announces the connection of historical time with Christ. Our civilization measures time in relation to him: BC or AD. In the year of our Lord 2000 Christians celebrate the two thousandth anniversary of Christ’s birth. In accord with ecclesial tradition the Pope has also declared the year 2000 a jubilee year, a year of grace and forgiveness, a year in which special indulgence is granted. Indeed, due to the combination of the jubilee and the millennial anniversary of Christ’s birth, this jubilee has been designated the Great Jubilee.

Mircea Eliade, the great scholar of the history of religions, has pointed out the striking difference between Judaeo-Christianity and all the other religions of the ancient world. Whereas the myths of primitive and cultured pagans presuppose that time involves a fall from an original golden age or even from the moment of creation when the gods and heroes acted out the patterns of significant behavior, Christianity grounds all meaning in a temporal moment itself, the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. While pagan religions see time basically as a fall from a primitive perfection which has to be constantly renewed through the cyclic, liturgical representation of the original moment, Christianity opens man kind to growth as well as decline in time. Be cause time carries real novelty which saves, history becomes the place of salvation.¹ His tory is the place of free human acts, in which God and man meet.

The Great Jubilee is obviously concerned with numbers and time. The Pope’s encyclical, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, dedicated its second chapter to a meditation on time. For time is a mystery as Christ is a mystery. At first that statement may seem ridiculous. To many time represents the most obvious and superficial reality. All measure it with clocks and watches and plan meetings by it. Yet what would happen if all clocks and watches fail? Would time stop? Clocks obviously do not give us time but only measure the time that is. Aristotle defined time as the measure of motion according to before and after.² But our post-Einsteinian age has learned of the relativity of time. Motion can be measured differently from different perspectives within a universe in motion. There is no stable point outside the universe from which time may be universally measured and an objective standard given. What then is time? In his famous meditation in the Confessions Augustine saw that the past no longer exists and the future does not yet exist. The present is always passing even as one attempts to measure it; indeed, the present moment permits ever further subdivision until one recognizes that it apparently possesses no duration. Augustine concluded that time is measured in the soul that re members, experiences, and anticipates. Only so can the past and the future be present as existing and capable of measurement; only so can the unity in diversity of time be preserved.³ But that answer is only partial insofar as the measuring soul is itself enveloped by time. Measurement implies a beginning and an end. If time goes beyond man how can it be measured? Time rather seems to measure man.

What then is time? As Augustine noted, neither the past nor the future exists. The present is fleeting and, like the fugitive point of a Zenonian paradox, can be infinitely subdivided. By the time we have measured it, it is already past. The Latin expression, tempus fugit, catches the paradox well, for the verb reflects equally present and past tenses: at the same time “time flees” and “time has flown.” Whence and whither does time flee? Since man controls neither its beginning nor end he cannot answer that question. In more philosophical language, time is rooted in the infinite potency of matter and matter is unintelligible to man. Hence the question of time re flects the question of human existence. “The figure of this world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:31).

How does man deal with time, a time that provides the “stuff” of his earthly existence yet threatens that limited existence with its own apparently limitless extent? Nature religions attempt to tie time to the ever repeating cycle of the seasons, imagining these events as reflections of heavenly or primordial happenings. Time has meaning only insofar as it participates in the eternal. Its meaning is entirely borrowed; of itself it is void since nothing that is of lasting value can be historically new. Time, fallen from primordial perfection, becomes the eternal return of the same. That can be debilitating for human action insofar as nothing new can be accomplished in this world. And the feeling of purposelessness in action only reinforces the perception that time is eviscerated of its meaning. More philosophical religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, maintain that salvation can consist only in the escape from the cycle of reincarnation, from time and all limitations, to the bliss of unlimited consciousness or, its equivalent, consciouslessness. But such a vision only further diminishes the significance of this world and all that happens in it. Man is caught in a trap: in order to escape from this passing world he must live well in it without attaching any significance to it.

The dilemma is only compounded for modern man who prides himself on the meaning he has created in history. Time is where he invests all his meaning, building a more humane civilization. But once he attributes all meaning to temporal events, he loses meaning since time presupposes some standard or measure transcending time. If time is all that there is, time apparently stretches from a limitless past into a limitless future. No finite mind can make sense of such infinite duration. Time has been absolutized and man cannot transcend it in such a way as to judge it and find standards for his action. He is subjected to the necessity of the present, the past, and the future. That is a blind and debilitating destiny. Not without reason has the Pope constantly reiterated that freedom is meaningless unless it is bound to a truth transcending man.

All merely human attempts to master time are doomed to failure. If man seeks to transcend time and find meaning outside time, time is left without inherent significance. If, on the other hand, man seeks to find or place all meaning in time, he has no means of judging time. Time becomes his master, and Chronos devours his children. Clearly in the face of time’s mystery all human wisdom turns into folly.

Judaeo-Christian revelation contradicts all merely human wisdom by proclaiming that time has a beginning and an end and that what occurs in time has eternal significance. God sets a beginning and an end to time, and because God is Love there can be no final opposition between Infinite and finite, eternity and time, God and man. God made time in order that free creation might return to him. Creation is not nothing, for a loving God has placed it in existence; yet it does not signify a diminution or limitation of God, for it comes from nothing (ex nihilo).

Creation subsists in itself yet is entirely relative to God. Time then becomes the meeting place of God and man, the place of freedom when love responds to Love. The very structure of freedom involves the juncture of Infinite and finite, Absolute and relative. As Walter Kasper noted, were man incapable of encountering the Absolute, he would have no final reason for any choice.⁴ Any reason offered could be perennially placed into question, relativized by the finite’s unending search for the Absolute. Choice would be come arbitrary. Yet an immediate encounter with the Absolute would likewise deprive man of freedom of choice. Because there would be no distance, human freedom of choice would be overwhelmed, as in the beatific vision, by the necessity of choosing the Supreme Good. Only in the juncture of Absolute and finite is freedom of choice rendered possible. The finite provides the distance guaranteeing that choice is not forced while the Absolute immediately motivates the choice. God is present in being mediated by finite realities. In this is reflected the whole sacramental structure of Catholicism whereby the infinite God makes himself present in a finite figure (Gestalt) calling for the total dedication of love, and upon man’s response depends his eternal salvation or damnation.

That sacramental structure was present in creation of Adam and Eve, who were created in the image of the God who is Love. In their matrimonial love, a sacrament of creation, God was present as its foundation, force, and goal. Their love manifested and reflected the Love who is God. Unfortunately sin entered the world. Where Adam once proclaimed Eve “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” after sin neither wished to take responsibility for their act but blamed another; thus was their unity destroyed (Gen. 2:23; 3:11-13). Having destroyed the divine image of love, man would no longer be capable of finding God in a world of sin. There would be no reason to love, no Absolute to be found. The world would be without sense and man would either absolutize the finite or despair of all sense.

Though man rejected love, Love did not reject man. Already in expelling man from Paradise, St. Irenaeus noted,⁵ God showed his mercy, substituting garments of skins for the more prickly fig leaves covering the nakedness of Adam and Eve. With Abraham God’s renewing interventions became public history as he formed a particular people as his own in view of his only Son’s incarnation. Since Jesus is Love incarnate, men had to possess some understanding of what was being of fered to them as the greatest mystery. The Old Testament prepared for the New, instructing men about God’s faithful love and human sin, the need for a Savior to overcome hardness of heart. Time is seen then as a preparation for Christ, who fulfills all time (Gal. 4:4). As the Pope wrote, “time is indeed fulfilled by the very fact that God, in the Incarnation, came down into human history” (Tertio Millennio Adveniente 9). In Jesus the Absolute and the finite are personally joined indissolubly. God offers himself to man, renewing the image of God and making it reflect fully and sacramentally God’s love. The mystery of love is made most manifest, and Love incarnate lets man encounter God as clearly as is possible in a world of sin.

Just as Jesus’ humanity is fully human in being joined to the divine person, so time remains finite. It is not absolutized but saved. It has become in fullness the meeting place of divine and human freedoms. Because the Ab solute has entered time, the eschaton has arrived. “The time has been fulfilled, the king dom of God has come close. Repent and be lieve in the Gospel” (Mark 1:15a). As divine revelation Jesus cannot be surpassed. For greater than God is no one. He calls men to absolute adherence, to follow him even unto death. Men’s freedom is to be actualized by joining themselves personally to Jesus in freedom and so forming his Body, the Church. Time is henceforth fulfilled, the place of commitment and love is realized.

This efficacious call to salvation which is mediated through the sacraments of the Church occurs only because of what Christ has accomplished in time. His whole life was one of obedience to and proclamation of the Father’s will (Heb. 5:7-10; Matt. 6:10). His daily self-offering was fulfilled in Gethsema ne when he prayed, “Not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). There his human will was most closely united to the Father, most thoroughly penetrated by the Love that is God. Reversing the story of the original garden in which Adam and Eve sought immortality through the imposition of their own wills in deciding what was good and evil, Christ submitted his human will to the Father and chose death in order to give life. He lived fully what he preached, and in his death his message of love, which necessarily involves self-sacrifice, manifested his credibility. In Jesus’ Passion and death the human was entirely penetrated with the Love that is God. The person of the Son, one in being from all eternity with the Father, expressed himself fully in his humanity as he overcame all temptation and all human resistance to the full sacrifice of love. He gave himself fully into the Father’s hands for the sake of men. Insofar as history is composed of human acts and human acts are free only on the condition that they meet and respond to God, Jesus realized the full meaning of history in his death and resurrection. There the human is no longer opposed in any way to the divine but has given itself and been taken up entirely into divine life.

Though the resurrection, by transcending time and anticipating the end of time, may at first seem an escape from time, it really manifests the full meaning of historical time. What had been accomplished in Gethsemane and on Calvary remained veiled to the understanding of sinful men. It seemed another case of a well-meaning, but unsuccessful prophet who went down in ruins, and the garbage bin of history is filled with such human failures. In the words of the discouraged disciples on the way to Emmaus, “We had hoped” (Luke 24:21).

The resurrection was needed by sinful men in order that they might recognize what in fact happened on Calvary: God conquered sin in the face of death as Love was fully realized in a human life. The resurrection made clear that God’s love is stronger than death and all temptations to sin, that Jesus is fully one with the Father even in the depths of his humanity. The resurrection made clear that time was not abolished for Jesus but was assumed into his divine life. His glorified body bears the marks of his Passion in all eternity. God’s eternity is not opposed to time but embraces it just as God’s love is not opposed to human freedom but makes it most itself in penetrating it. Since Jesus’ resurrection both initiates the resurrection from the dead and anticipates that final resurrection of our bodies, the meaning of time for us is assured. Our resurrection means that all the good which God has accomplished in space and time through us is not abandoned but taken up into eternity. The whole man, body and soul, with all his historical development is called to eternal salvation.

Before the final consummation, time marks this world as the place of growth from Christ’s fullness into greater fullness. The “already” of God’s presence does not destroy but empowers the “not yet” of human freedom’s response. In Jesus’ call to discipleship which involves the sacrifice and relativization of the whole world (Mark 8:34-38) God’s omnipotence is manifested not to destroy human freedom but to actualize it. The “in dicative” of God’s love historically realized in Jesus’ cross and resurrection grounds the “imperative” of discipleship. God’s love has done all in freeing us from selfishness but our response depends also upon us. So time re tains its meaning for the Christian. No longer a preparation for Christ, it is life out of fullness. It is the superabundance of incarnate Love, the “good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over” which has been put into our lap (Luke 6:38).

From this superabundance flows Christian mission, evangelization. Christian love is naturally expansive and God calls all men to it. In time non-believers are called to become Christians and Christians are challenged to become ever more themselves, identifying themselves ever more with Christ, the plenitude of Love, the fullness of time, the Alpha and the Omega (Apoc. 1:8; 21:6), joining the Church, “His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all” in accomplishing God’s “plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph. 1:10.23). Christ is the ultimate measure containing all time and joining it to God.

The intermediary reconciling of the world to God is accomplished through the Church as God’s instrument of salvation. The Church is most herself in the eucharistic assembly. There the great liturgical act of the Mass re-presents Christ’s sacrifice, an historical mo ment, in order to offer human beings the op portunity of appropriating salvation in the here and now and thus transforming their lives. Besides representing the past act of Christ, making present the foundation of Christian faith, the Mass also celebrates Jesus’ resurrection and anticipates God’s final victory over sin. “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” Thus all of salvific time is recapitulated in the Mass. Because Jesus is really present, men can identify the locus of God’s will in space and time. Time itself is grounded in Christ’s life, both human and divine, for he offers to human freedom and historicity their final meaning. As the Absolute entered into the relativity of history, the juncture of God and man, he saves the meaning of time, making it the bearer of eternal salvation for all who accept in freedom his self-sacrificial love. They find the meaning of their lives by making Christ’s love their own. When they approach the Eucharist and the priest, acting in persona Christi, says, “The Body of Christ,” to that offer of sacrificed Love they are empowered to respond with love, “Amen,” to let Christ enter their hearts, and so to grow in freedom. The Great Jubilee celebrates the mystery of salvation which gives time and human freedom their meaning. In this sense it can become a source of renewal in the Church, calling Christians and all men to conversion and to growth, to baptism, to the confession of sins, and to the Eucharist. No matter how many years pass, the Church is always renewed by returning to her source in the Mass, Jesus Christ, yesterday, today, and always, the eternal God who became man, dead and risen. He is the mystery in whom time and every other finite reality have their consistency (Col. 1:17).  

¹ This theme recurs often in M. Eliade’s works: cf., e.g., Cosmos and History, tr. W. Trask (1954; rpt. New York: Harper, 1959) or The Sacred and Profane, tr. W. Trask (1959; rpt. New York; Harper, 1961), ch. 2, pp. 68-113.

² Aristotle, Physics, IV, 11, 219a1-3.

³ Augustine, Confessiones, XI, 15-21 (18-27), 26-29 (33-39).

⁴ W. Kasper, Jesus the Christ, tr. V. Green (1976; rpt. New York: Paulist, 1977), pp. 52-58.