The Fact and Fullness of Time

St. Nicholas, once the patron saint that embodied the glorious celebration of the first Advent, has been transformed into a corpulent cartoon of enchantment, indulging consumer culture with gadgets and gift-cards. Meanwhile the stunning facts of reality, such that St. Luke evidenced, go entirely neglected — at least in the marketplace. (But where isn’t the marketplace anymore?) In the hands of sentimentalism and consumption, Saint Nick devolved into an icon of the ridiculous; replete with North Pole inhabitants, a trade union of elves, magic dust, airborne forest-animals, and is himself  the supreme gift-giver who adjudicates good from bad. The “god of goods” for the good. In this American tale, anthropology is re-written with optimistic flare. One only need be “nice.” Meanwhile, we can hope for a Lexus this holiday, as we — in the words of their commercial — “celebrate whatever.” Indeed, who needs a Savior when we’re pretty nice.

Celebrate “whatever” is all that we’re left with in a society that jettisons biblical history, and marginalises Christ as an addendum to the real “reason for the season” — time off. The iconoclasm of 2020 actually started long ago when nativity scenes were purged from public spaces, and replaced with inflatable Grinches. Something specifically time-bound (the birth of Jesus) has been exchanged for something utterly atemporal (Kris Kringle). It turns out that Pollyanna is not merely our practice for office parties, it’s all-too-often our outlook on reality.

The Evangelist Luke, however, offers a dose of realism with his historical biography on Jesus of Nazareth. He does so through a factual recounting of events from the first century that dwarfs celebrating “whatever” with car payments. Luke calls us to celebrate our personal and collective lives put right with God and further transformed by divine self-giving.

Luke shows us that when we try to fit God into our life movie, the plot is all wrong; and not just wrong but trivial. There’s so much more at stake. Christmas connotes a birth, yes. But the build up to it through four weeks of Advent tells us that it’s also an anniversary of the most monumental sort that bears (or, at least, should bear) directly on our lives. Paul, the traveling companion of Luke and likely the primary source of his Gospel, makes much of this when he announces that “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Galatians 4:4-5). The “fulness of time.” This phrase has as its touchstone the Advent of our King — Jesus. Paul knew Jesus, met him, learned from him (Galatians 1:11-12). Paul underscores the fact of the Messiah with the fact of the fullness of time. And so does Luke (Luke 24:44-45). The birth of Jesus was “in accordance with the Scriptures,” and not only the Scriptures but the linear progression of human history itself culminates in the Advent of our King.

Luke shows us that when we try to fit God into our life movie, the plot is all wrong; and not just wrong but trivial

Note how Paul recognizes that all of humanity are “under the law.” What this King does in the fullness of time is the reason for the annual, global celebration that requires nearly a month build up time to capture something of its scope, and a full twelve-day festival to monumentalize it: He comes “to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.”

Advent purposes to pull us out of our own life-movie, and recast us as characters in the fact of Christ’s unfolding plot. When this happens and we’re not distracted by endless holiday trappings, then we become part of the greatest event in history. It is through God’s word of judgment and word of redemption, particularly poignant in Holy Baptism, that immerses our autobiography and lost anthropology into the grand narrative that revolves around the fact of Jesus. In the process, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us, the fullness of time bears on us and redefines us:

We are uprooted from our own [fantasy] existences and are taken back to the holy history of God on earth. Real time. Real history. There God has dealt with us, with our needs and our sins, by means of the divine wrath against treason and divine grace that flows from His love. What is important is not that God is a spectator and participant in our life today, but that we are attentive listeners and participants in God’s action in the sacred story, the history of Christ on earth. And only in so far as we are there, God is with us today also [1].

Our salvation is from outside ourselves in something that happened over there and right then — in the fullness of time. Salvation cannot be found in my life story, but only in the fact of Christ Jesus. What we call our life, our troubles, and our guilt is by no means the whole of reality. To be sure, our life, our need, our guilt, and our deliverance are very much of the here and now, but they have semblance and significance bound to the historical realities recorded in Holy Scripture, but also the artifacts of historical investigation. And that’s what Bonhoeffer gets at when he says that when we are connected to “there” (i.e., the fullness of time), we then find ourselves loved, saved, justified, authentically human and significant.

Salvation cannot be found in my life story, but only in the fact of Christ Jesus

Hence, the third fact of Advent: The Incarnation occurred in the fullness of time, and we need to be connected to it. It did not occur “once upon a time” or “in my heart” but precisely “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar” (Luke 3:1). Once we hear the story of Christmas that way, then we hear it aright. C. S. Lewis understood this and said, “I haven’t always been a Christian. I didn’t go to Christianity to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity”[2]. The point is that, if you are given to virtual reality, gaming, cyberspace, fairy-tales, transhumanism, platitudinous political promises, suburbia, sentimentalism, subjectivism, “truthiness,” subculture identity, being high and “a one-horse open sleigh,” then the last place you will want to be ensconced is in fact-based history. Extending this though, Lewis elsewhere writes,

We are defending Christianity; not ‘my religion’…. The great difficulty is to get modern audiences to realize that you are preaching Christianity solely and simply because you are convinced by evidence and reason that it is true; they always suppose you are preaching it because you like it or think it good for society or something of that sort [3].

The Incarnation occurred in the fullness of time, and we need to be connected to it. It did not occur “once upon a time” or “in my heart”

As Luke the historian prepares us for John the Baptist’s dramatic appearance as the forerunner to the coming King, he names no less than seven historical figures to establish the date and context of John’s ministry. This in turn further establishes the fact of Advent and, indeed, establish that Christianity is true:

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness. (Luke 3:1-2)

Together, the names indicate that John began his public ministry about AD 27-29. Even more, they establish the political situation of Roman-ruled Judea. All the civil names given here intimate wickedness and intrigue: Tiberius, Pilate, Herod, Philip, Lysanias. The religious names (Annas and Caiaphas) project a degenerate, nepotistic priesthood. It was against this backdrop of political and religious darkness that “the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the desert” (v. 2). This, Luke would have us know, initiates what Paul would describe as “the fullness of time”: Maximal crisis meets Christic solution. These are chosen characters, for a chosen moment, yielding the Chosen One.

From the first century, Christians have claimed that the world was uniquely prepared for the coming of the Messiah and the birth of Christianity. It is first expressed by Simeon who longed to see the consolation of Israel and believed the words the prophets said about the coming of God to reclaim and restore His earthly kingdom. Paul and Luke recognize the same fact as they reflect upon the historical developments that swept them into the ocean of Christ’s vast and expanding kingdom. Michael Green put it like this:

Probably no period in the history of the world was better suited to receive the infant church than the first century A.D. By the second century Christians began to argue that it was a divine providence which had prepared the world for the advent of Christianity [4].

What kind of world would allow for such a rapid spread of this new faith? What was the historical context for the advent of Christianity? There are at least three sources of influence that came together in the Roman Empire that contributed to its becoming a global phenomenon: (1) the political influence of the Romans, (2) the cultural and intellectual influence of the Greeks and (3) the religious influence of the Jews.

First, the Romans. The reign of Caesar Augustus inaugurated the pax romana, or “Roman peace,” two centuries of economic and cultural growth and stability marked by the near absence of military conflict within the empire. This era of peace allowed for freedom of movement and relative safety throughout the Roman world and where people travel, ideas follow. The conditions of the pax romana facilitated the rapid spread of Christian ideas in the Roman Empire. It was the right climate for the right time. And yet, everyone knew the Roman peace was established and maintained by servile obedience to deadly force and volatile political powers. Christ would come to grant a peace that the world of the Caesars could never give.

Thousands of miles of Roman roads connected major cities as well as outlying areas of the Empire, facilitating and encouraging travel throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond. Great journeys could be had in the first and second centuries, and the literature of the day substantiates it. Following the fall of the Roman Empire, such trips were rare or impossible until modern times. Christians exploited this infrastructure, taking the gospel beyond the four corners of the Empire.

Of course, the Roman army was the instrument of maintaining peace, but it also became a major force for disseminating ideas, especially by provincial recruits, some of whom were Christians. They carried their beliefs and devotions wherever they were stationed.

Second, Greek Influence. In the process of conquering the Hellenistic world, the Romans absorbed and adapted many facets of Greek civilization, including their language. Alexander the Great had made vernacular Greek, koine, the common tongue of the East. Under the Roman Empire, it became the common tongue of the West. The presence of such a lingua franca meant Christianity could spread quickly, especially since Christians—the Apostles and Evangelistic included—wrote in Greek. And Greek bore ideas and vocabulary quite conducive to Christianity.

In the centuries leading up to the Advent, Greek philosophy trended away from polytheism and toward monotheism, so much so that Larry Hurtado could speak of Jesus as the “destroyer of the gods”[5]. Greek philosophers contemplated natural law, ethics, mankind’s brotherhood, and the afterlife. These ideas opened their minds to discussing “the Unknown God” (Acts 17:23).

The third contribution of the Jews eclipses that of the Romans and Greeks combined. The Diaspora brought about familiarity with the Hebrew’s Scriptures and customs throughout the known world. Consequently, there circulated knowledge of Jewish monotheistic beliefs and messianic expectations, all the more so when the Hebrew Bible was translated and disseminated in Greek as the Septuagint. It was in this context of heightened messianic expectations that Jesus’s followers claimed that he was the Christ of God who had been expected to arrive in the fulness of time.

The Moses and the prophets espoused a linear view of history, the idea that God was accomplishing his purpose in the world by moving things to a great moment of climax. Christians claimed that Jesus had fulfilled many of the ancient prophecies, thus proving that He was the end toward which history had been moving precisely “in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea.” Luke reported news. God the Son came here. He bled to death hanging on a tree to achieve reconciliation. He bodily rose from the grave for our justification. None of these things were accidental or coincidental, but rather the result of the fact of divine providence: Hence, Jesus arrives in the fullness of time as the son of David and God’s Son.

When news like this breaks onto the scene it changes people, or at least it impacts the thinking and behaviors of people who understand it and its implications. You cannot continue thinking about the world in the old way, especially Christmas. That’s why John’s announcement of the arriving King and his kingdom is accompanied by the word “repent.” 

We should not write off our desire for fulfillment and happiness, especially during these holy days of Advent and Christmas. People were created for meaning, purpose, joy, and fulfillment. As C.S. Lewis reminds us, it’s not that our desires are too strong but that they are too weak — “seek first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added to you” (Matthew 6:33). The Great King sent the Prince of Life out of His loving desire to give us the quality of life that is eternal.

You cannot continue thinking about the world in the old way, especially Christmas. That’s why John’s announcement of the arriving King and his kingdom is accompanied by the word “repent”

The fact of the fullness of time ought to bring great comfort. Our time is special, but not that special. The fullness of time isn’t today. Rather, it began with the Annunciation to virginal Mary and concluded with the Ascension of our Lord Jesus. We are called to be connected to that, to be found (in the words of Bonhoeffer) there, and to celebrate not “whatever” but specifically the Advent of our King. And it is there that we’ll find the source of our present joy and peace and fulfillment.