The Filling up of Time to Completion

 

Matthew 26:14-27:66

Palm Sunday / Year A

Tuesday, January 25^th, 2056 should be a seminal day in my life.  According to the website deathclock.com, this is the day I am going to expire at the tender ago of 96 years, 3 months, and 15 days – just 10,893 days away!  To learn this, all I had to do was tell Deathclock my date of birth, gender, height, weight, outlook on life, and how much I smoke and drink – none and none.  Then, functioning like an actuarial table, it takes all of this in, mulls it over for a nanosecond, and then delivers its verdict.

I took this test years ago (back when I was drinking) and the results were not nearly as rosy.  Back then, when I shared what I learned with friends, most thought it was morbid, all except for one clergy colleague who said, “Hummm, January 25^th, that will be your saint’s day!  They always set it on the day you die.”

You might expect the news I have almost 11,000 more days to live would make me ecstatic, but, in truth, it doesn’t.  It feels like too much time, like I have all the time in the world, like nothing is pressing, like I can just put off X (whatever X might be) until another day.  Given this very real temptation, I worry I will not act on a wisdom Bernie Siegel identifies in his book Handbook for the Soul:

In many cases, people who’ve become aware of their mortality find that they’ve gained the freedom to live.  They are seized with an appreciation of the present: every day is my best day; this is my life; I’m not going to have this moment again.  They spend more time with the things and people they love and less time on people and pastimes that don’t offer love or joy.  This seems like such a simple thought – shouldn’t we all spend our lives that way?  But we tend not to make those kinds of choices until someone says, “You’ve got twelve months to live.”

We learn from the gospels how Jesus embodies this wisdom.  Three different times he tells his followers he must go to Jerusalem where he will die.  The first comes after the arrest and beheading of his cousin John.  The second comes after The Transfiguration, the mountaintop moment when Moses and Elijah appear to him and they discuss his impending visit to the Holy City.  The third comes a little before he enters Jerusalem on the day we now celebrate as Palm Sunday.  Each time we are told his disciples either do not understand what he is saying or state outright it will never happen.

If you ask Google about the significance of Jesus knowing he is going to die in Jerusalem, it will tell you first and foremost it shows he can predict the future.  Honestly, this doesn’t do a lot for me.  To me what matters most is not that Jesus knows he is going to die, but what he does with this knowledge.  I believe with all my heart Jesus’ life and ministry would have been far less impactful, would have born far less fruit if he had failed to embrace his own mortality.

The gospel of Luke is divided into roughly three somewhat equal sections.  The first takes us from Jesus’ birth to his baptism and then recounts his early days of ministry – gathering followers, healing, and teaching.  The second section, fully nine chapters, details all that happens as he travels for the last time to Jerusalem.  The final section records the events of his death, resurrection, and ascension.  Think about that for moment.  Jesus spends the first thirty-some years of his life in relative obscurity, working in a wood shop of some sort.  Then he emerges from the Jordon waters and becomes a public figure for a little more than two years.  What does it say to you that 2/3rds of the gospel are dedicated to the last few months of his life?  It says to me he made the most of his life once he accepted his time was limited.

There is a telling sentence in the gospel: “When the days drew near for him, Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem.” ^{Luke 9:5} Scholars note the verb in the phrase ‘the days drew near’ literally means ‘in the filling up to the completion of his days.’  We would say Jesus set out to make the most of the time he had left.  Those nine chapters are filled with accounts of his teaching, stories of meeting and eating with all sorts and conditions of people, and restoring to all who were broken health of body and soul.  He savored when Mary anointed his feet with costly nard.  He cried at the grave of his friend.  He gathered his followers for one final meal.

Josephus, a historian during Jesus’ days, tells us that in one year alone the Roman general Varus crucified over 2,000 Jews, which is to say it was a prominent form of execution.  Of all who suffered this form of capital punishment we know the name of only one.  All the rest are lost to history.  Surely there are many reasons why Jesus is remembered.  One of the factors has to be how he filled up the time he had, not wasting even a single moment or opportunity to live out God’s dream for all people.   

Mitch Albom writes this in his book Have a Little Faith:

“The story of my recent life.”  I like that phrase.  It makes more sense than “the story of my life”, because we get so many lives between birth and death.  A life to be a child.  A life to come of age.  A life to wander, to settle, to fall in love, to parent, to test our promise, to realize our mortality – and in some lucky cases, to do something after that realization.

I invite you, no matter what the phase of your current life may be, to consider how Jesus used his time and how, as the end approached, he tended to the things he did not want to leave left undone.  Even if, like me, you have 10,893 left, make each day count.  Make it a reflection of how you want to live and move and have your being in God.