"Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? 'Father, save me from this hour'? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify thy name." Then a voice came from heaven, "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again." The crowd standing by heard it and said that it had thundered. Others said, "An angel has spoken to him." Jesus answered, "This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out; and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself." John 12:27–32 (RSV)
It is 10:15 p.m. on the seventh of October in the year of our Lord, Two Thousand Twenty. I have measured the time in which I began to write this devotion. I will post it tomorrow morning between 6:00 a.m and 7:00 a.m. I will attempt sleep between those times, then, God willing, rise to begin the race of a new day. I have seen 25,523 days come and go since the day I was born. I have far fewer days before me than I have behind me.
We all mark the hours of our lives as they march forward toward the day when the clock will stop for us. Everyone lives their lives according to this rule of time, one-second races to the next. It is what Scripture calls 'chronos,' the passing of the hours. It is the line we all must travel, going only forward to the next hour, day, month, or year. Thus it has been since God created the first day until God decrees that all the days are ended.
Into the chronos time, God sends a kairos, the right time, the fullness of time, the time that all else has waited upon and blessed its coming. Jesus was born in the kairos, the fullness of time. His death on the cross was a kairos. There the power of sin, death, and the power of the devil ended. The resurrection is the kairos in which all other moments are redeemed.
Jesus knew that the kairos has come, the right moment in which all God has promised and proposed is completed. While all else only sees the chronos time pass, Jesus considers the kairos time in which all promises are kept, sin and death collapse into His mercy, and the call breaks the eternal sleep of the grave of our name.
God, who created the chronos, will one day command it to cease and be no more. It will have fulfilled its purpose. On that day, kairos will begin it's eternal now. We will become timeless through the Fathers' love and mercy.
Jesus is the beginning of that eternal kairos. As we live in Him, we live closer and closer to the fulfillment and completion of time.