THE FULLNESS OF TIME

 

Sermon delivered on the Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary the 15th August 2010 by Fr Nicholas J.G. Sykes in the congregation of St. Alban's Church of England, George Town, Cayman Islands in the service of the Holy Eucharist.

 

Scriptures:             Isaiah 61: 10-end                   Galatians 4: 4-7                       S. Luke 1: 46-55

 

Galatians 4: 4  “When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.”

 

St. Paul reminds us in Galatians 4:4 that even if we cannot wholly design and predict things, God indeed can. “When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” There are all sorts of questions that could be raised from the phrase “When the time had fully come”.  We are tempted to ask about the times before the time had fully come. Did not God have His sons before Jesus was sent forth, born of Mary? Just as when I hear the account of Jesus healing the woman with the issue of blood for 12 years, I may want to ask, Did not God love that woman even after the first six years of the disease, or three? A baptismal candidate being made a child of God by baptism at the age of ten, may ask herself, Did not God regard me as His daughter before?  Yet it would be churlish and unfortunate to make the fullness of time in which God sent His Son, or in which we are healed of a stubborn disease, or in which we are publicly admitted as His sons and daughters, an occasion of quarrelsome question and complaint rather than an occasion of thanks and praise. In ways that are not fully explainable, God does work His mind and purpose out with His children in a process of time, and we are called to be ever-watchful, in patience and faith, for the time of fulfilment, in which He is glorified, and for which we give Him praise.

 

The Old Testament Lesson contains what I am sure is to many a favourite verse: “For as the earth brings forth her shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations.” Any gardener will admit that while you can do things intelligently and make good choices about what to put where, the outcome is far from being controllable, because factors other than those the gardener controls are involved, such as temperature, rainfall, soil chemical balance, wind and so on. Nevertheless, the growth occurs. But all this is an image of God causing righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations, and we will rightly see the presence of Christ in the world, and the sprinkling of baptised persons in the world living out their Spirit-generated life in His Name, as fulfilling the prophetic vision. The power and effectiveness of this we can never be right to discount, just as we are not right to think that trees and plants will not find their ways of growing in the crevices of rocks, however forbidding such an environment may seem to be.

 

So we as members of Christ need never discount the ability and intention of God to effect His glorious purpose, no matter how sorrowful the present circumstances seem to be. This is an outlook that can produce positive results in all sorts of circumstances. Knowing this, we do not need to give up hope if we get unwell. Knowing this, we do not commit crimes if we are poor. Knowing this we do not have to give up the church even if bishops and priests and others do the stupidest of things. When important letters are unanswered and critical issues are left unattended to we can rightly go on as if we are the winners, because we are of Christ and the Gospel, and not, as S. Paul remarked, enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. The Lord will bring about His purpose in the fullness of time.

 

Who is there better to instruct us of these realities than the Blessed Virgin Mary herself in the words that she has left in Holy Scripture? To a divine word to her with the most profound and frightening implications she said, "Behold, I am the servant of the Lord. Be it unto me according to thy word!"  Her mind and heart were filled not with the many difficulties that now confronted her, but with the divine purpose that she was to have a part in fulfilling. The great utterance of the Gospel’s Magnificat in its very grammatical construction illustrates the point. In the Elizabethan English of the Prayer Book we read, "He hath shewed strength with his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away. He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel: as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed for ever."  All this is said by Mary in the past tense as if she has seen the fulfilment of those words happening in front of her. Yet they were said when she was still carrying the Messiah in her womb. These things that she was extolling God for were in the future, because it was through the Messiah that they would be fulfilled. the Greek tense used for the verbs was aorist, a past tense, yet they were in the past only in the sense that they were as good as done, because they were the fulfilment of the promises of God. A simple exercise would be to write down this passage in the future tense rather than the past, and see how it reads. You will find that it comes over far less strongly.  The Lord was about to bring forth the fulfilment of His purpose in the fullness of time, indeed the beginning of the fulfilment was already upon her - and she was living by faith in the time of fulfilment, rather than by sight in the time of waiting.

 

Friends, this is our calling too, to live not by the sight of the difficulties we face, but by faith in the fulfilment that God has assured to us through the same Messiah that Mary was expecting, and through the same Messiah who healed and sustained many in Israel. If we are asked whether that is difficult to do, to transfer from living by sight to living by faith, the answer is not that it is difficult, but that our will to do it is imperfect. Because of that imperfection, our need for the grace of God is clear, our need for His continuing Word and for the sacramental graces that God continues to bestow upon us through the Body of Christ, His church. The need for that will remain until the final Day when faith and Sight shall be joined together in one single Vision of the Lord.