Catacomb Resident Blog

Misreading Scripture: Time 01

24 March 2024

Most of us are aware of the common western notions about time. There's a wealth of English figures of speech to indicate that time is treated as a precious commodity. It's impossible to literally buy it, but our culture is wrapped around the wringer on trying to make the most of it, as if it were something you could lose. R/OB don't mention this, but it's in part because the West worships youth and dreads aging.

Our language also offers a wealth of precision about timing of events, indicating all kinds of tenses showing when it takes place, if it continues, etc. Indonesian languages have a "today" and "tomorrow", but not much else, offering no difference between past, present and future. And in biblical Greek, duration was more important than when.

Meanwhile, for Indonesians, the time of day had more to do with the temperature. The word translated "midday" means when the heat builds up, and something like "afternoon" actually means when it starts to cool down. It might be a different point on the clock each day. When Sunday comes, they wander in over the course of an hour or so before formal church activities start. They don't schedule things, and events end when they are finished.

Contrast that with our western awareness that sees time more and more closely measured now than ever, when church might begin on the quarter-hour. And things will start by the schedule, no matter who shows up. Don't try that in Indonesia. If you wear a watch, you will hate places like that.

I've long taught that the Hebrew culture viewed time quite differently than western folks. We see it as "linear and discrete" but, as noted in our previous book study, the Bible views it as cyclical. The right time for something in the Bible is when it's ripe, according to the nature of the thing we are discussing.

In western Bibles, the books are organized beginning to end. They aren't actually in chronological order, but we tend to act as if they are. We think of it as a linear flow from one thing to the next. When we read mentions of time, we remember all the places where it seems to say "make the most of the time" or something to that effect in the New Testament. However, what isn't obvious to us is that Greek has two words we translate as "time" -- chronos and kairos.

The word chronos comes close to our use; it's a quantitative term, though less precise than we might like. The smallest unit tends to be hours. However, kairos refers to quality; something important happened. It's more about seasons or other indeterminate periods marked more by what happened than how long it took. Thus, we should note that God didn't plan the birth of Jesus by a chronometer, but when conditions were right. We still don't know precisely when it was, and I'm convinced God did that on purpose.

Thus, when Jesus said something about watching because we can't predict when an important event is going to happen, it wasn't a matter of urgency of time, but of vigilance of the heart.


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