Time-Peace

September has featured the Jewish New Year: Rosh Hashanah. To celebrate the new year in this month may seem odd for most of us in Europe and America: we are so used to consulting the apparently easy-going Gregorian calendar on the wall, which seems so simple and staid.

It was not always so. Our calendar came from Rome originally: in fact, it used to be called the Julian Calendar, named after Julius, the most famous Caesar of them all. In 46BC, Julius took some good ideas from Egypt - about a year being 365 and a quarter days - and he introduced it to Rome to replace an old calendar of the moon, which was hopelessly out of date. In those momentous times, Caesar decided that the only way get his new calendar to fit on the end of the old one was to add extra months onto the first year. Therefore, Julius’s new calendar of 365 days, with its familiar extra day every four years, was inaugurated by a year of 445 days!

That year was afterwards called the "Year of Confusion": birthdays, annual rents, contracts and other anniversaries were plunged into a chaos of temporary uncertainty until the Julian calendar proper kicked in. If a man lived in your rented house during the extra months, did he owe more annual rent? Did those months even exist in law? Roman lawyers had a field day.

There was more to come, for the new scheme was inaccurate. There are actually slightly less than 365.25 days in the average year, by about 11 minutes. This meant that, every leap year, each extra day added more minutes than were necessary to correct the calendar. For almost 1600 years, unnoticed by most people, extra minutes piled up into hours and hours became days. Eventually, the calendar was ten days ahead. Something had to be done to correct the 10-day gap and, in addition, fine-tune Julius’s scheme to make it more accurate. Up stepped Pope Gregory with an idea: if 5th October, 1582, could be followed by 15th October, the 10-day-excess would be cancelled out. Of course, life is rarely that simple: there were riots, as people complained the Holy Father had shortened their lives! Birthdays, anniversaries, and rent-days disappeared with the stroke of a pen, in an odd repeat of the "Year of Confusion".
 
The most extreme reaction came from Protestants. They were deeply suspicious of the Pope, anyway, and the Book of Daniel taught that changing calendars was God's prerogative (Dan. 2:19-21). For a man to try it was a sign of the "Anti-Christ"! (Dan. 7:25)  So, centuries passed before some Protestant countries adopted Gregory’s calendar. Yet common sense prevailed.

The most ingenious part of Gregory’s program was the 400-year Rule. This is the feature that made his calendar far better than Julius’s one: by this rule, no century that cannot be divided by 400 can ever be a leap year: it explains why the years 1600 and 2000 were leap years, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not. By missing out just three February 29ths in 400 years, the 11-minute problem was solved. The Gregorian Calendar could now run merrily on: peace at last.
 
One of the most illuminating moments of my life was when I discovered that Biblical calendars were all designed to work alongside each other.  It was a typical example of God's Message of Peace. I wrote a rather academic book about it, arguing that the Spirit of Peace in the New Testament is implied in united calendars of the Old. It was technical, but the hidden message amid difficult detail was Love. Even some calendars that caused bitter controversy later were united in the Bible. It is symbolic of unity that I received letters of thanks and encouragement from the Chief Rabbi, Dr. Jonathan Sacks, and His Holiness, the late John Paul II. For those of a humorous bent, that makes me the only Presbyterian I know who has a Papal Blessing.
 
The Harvest of Love is the fruit of God's Work on Earth and that is what we need, most of all, despite all our cultural and personal differences. The Harvest of Love unites us: Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox and all believers in Love Himself. Christ reminded his disciples that God’s "times and seasons" lay beyond their ken - but Faith, Hope and Love do not. We have different perspectives, but God's Word calls us onward to new Unity in Him: beyond all Time.  

In that unity, while we live on Earth, spinning in relation to the sun and moon that govern time, we must share the Harvests of Earth and God's Love for one implies the other. To Christians, Time reminds us that we live in it and we can’t escape it by nature but Jesus, the Son of God, Love Himself, came into this world of time and conquered it on the Cross. Now, Time can fly.