Fullness of time

Today is New Year’s Eve. The end of an old year and the dawn of a new one.

For most people it is a time for both looking back and looking forward.

As you look back at your 2023, what has it contained for you? What experiences, losses, celebrations, struggles have filled the last 12 months?

Maybe as you look back you feel some relief that the year is over. Maybe you are looking back at a year that has filled you with the aching sadness of bereavement. Maybe you are looking back full of regret about things that you have done or said, or things that have been done or said to you.

And, as we sit on the ledge of the New Year, as we look ahead into 2024, how do we feel about what the future might hold for us?

Is there any anxiety or fear? Perhaps we are full of hope for the New Year. Hoping that we will find a fresh start, that we will have an opportunity to leave some of our bad habits behind us and not carry them into yet another year.

Perhaps we’re full of hope that our circumstances will improve? That 2024 will be filled with better things than 2023.

However, sometimes as we look around us at the problems in our family and our community, as we read the headlines, hope for the year ahead - for both ourselves and the wider world - can begin to wane.

We began the year with war… we end the year with war…. Many innocent civilians continue to die in the fighting between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, and many other places of conflict around the world.

We began the year with a devastated economy, broken government, divided communities,.. and we are ending the year with more of the same. We see the number of people using food banks rising dramatically here in the UK. We see a government and opposition looking as though they are running out of ideas of how to fix the many problems we face. We watch as politicians use cultural wars, and the stoking of fear, xenophobia and division to deflect from their mismanagement of the country.

Where is hope in all this?

At the time of our Gospel passage, this was how many people in Israel must have felt.

No-one had heard from God in 400 years. The many prophecies about a future promised salvation and rescue for the human condition had not been fulfilled. Where was the promised peace and goodwill to all men? Where was the Messiah, the saviour that had been promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Where was the future King, a descendant of King David, who would spring up to bring a reign of peace and righteousness to the world?

The people of Israel were living in an occupied land. Oppressed by the Roman Empire. They had no freedom, had to do what they were told by the occupying forces, even if, for Joseph, that meant travelling many miles to his family’s ancestral home of Bethlehem for a Roman census.

As Joseph travelled with his heavily pregnant wife, Mary; as he desperately tried to find decent accommodation for her to deliver her baby; as he had to settle on a donkey instead of an ambulance, a stable instead of a maternity ward and animals instead of midwives, he must have wondered where God was in all this. Where was hope in this moment in time?

Our reading from the book of Galatians gives us an answer to the question. The phrase that jumps out at me from that passage is “When the fullness of time had come…God sent his Son…”

Joseph may have wondered where was hope, where was God. But God was right there with him in that time that must have felt so desperate and chaotic for him and Mary.

God - hope for the world - was travelling into Bethlehem in Mary’s womb. The promised Emanuel, God with us, was entering into the world at just the right time. He was arriving when the fullness of time had come…. The time God had already planned when He spoke to the prophets centuries earlier. God had planned this moment before the creation of the world.

God had not forgotten his promise. Even if many of the people in that time had lost their hope in it.

Despite the wars, despite the occupation, despite the census that had provoked this chaotic journey, God was always in control. Joseph may have thought it was the political leaders who had caused him to be travelling to Bethlehem that day, but it was all a part of God’s plan that was now being revealed in the fullness of time.

Paul tells the Galatian church that 'when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children'.

This is the hope that Joseph and Mary carried into Bethlehem.

This is the hope, the angels shared with the Shepherds on the outskirts of Bethlehem. The angels brought them 'good news of great joy for all the people'. They told the shepherds of the Messiah being born and told them where to find this promised hope in a manger.

The shepherds believed this message of hope. They rushed to see for themselves if it was true. And, when they found the baby Jesus lying in the manger, they told everyone what they had heard about this child. That this child would save the world from the mess it was in.

Our reading from Galatians tells us that not only did God send his Son, God also 'sent the Spirit of his Son' into those shepherds’ hearts. The spirit that made them understand that this baby in front of them, this promised saviour, represented their adoption into God’s family. That this baby, in the fullness of time, would grow up, die on a cross and be resurrected, giving all humanity an opportunity for their sins to be forgiven, given those shepherds and all of us the opportunity to inherit salvation and the righteousness of God.

Paul tells the Galatian church that they, and all who will come to believe in Jesus, are heirs of God’s promised salvation. An heir is someone who inherits and continues the work of a predecessor.

And just as God sent His Son, and His Spirit, by adopting us and giving us the right to be heirs, God also sends us to continue His work on earth. He sends us, as he sent those shepherds, to share the good news with everyone in our lives.

We are called to be sharers of the message of his birth, life, death and resurrection in the fullness of time. We are called to tell people of the salvation he offers to all people. And we are called to share the news of the promise of God’s Kingdom, that has already come, but that will completely fill the earth in the fullness of time.

And it is vital that we take on this responsibility as heirs of God’s kingdom.

It’s vitally important that we share the good news because, just as we might be glad to shut the lid on a year that has perhaps contained what we felt was the full capacity of what we can bear. Just as we may be looking forward to receiving tomorrow the container of a New Year, that we hope might be filled with a lighter load, a more hope-filled 12 months than the 12 we have come to the end of…

...There are so many people in our world who are desperate to know that they don’t have to carry around the full container of what they’ve gotten wrong, and of the wrong things that have been done to them.

We need to share the news with everyone that we no longer have to carry around our sins and regrets. That, despite the wars, despite the injustices, despite occupations and uprisings, despite the political schemes and corruption, God is in control – even when all looks chaotic in our lives and the world around us.

The Good News is that in the fullness of time, God sent his Son so that our containers can be emptied. Jesus carried the full cup of all of our sins on the cross and offers us a new container, a clean slate, forgiveness, righteousness, a new name, a New Year.

And God promises that, when Jesus returns in the fullness of time, God’s Kingdom of peace will be fully revealed to the world, putting an end to the conflicts and wars that fallen humanity is constantly embroiled in.

As we count down the clock tonight (or at least those of us who will be staying up to see out the old year and see in the new) let us pray that whatever the New Year contains for us, we will fill ourselves with the hope of God’s promises. That we will, like Mary and Joseph, carry Jesus with us into the circumstances and situations we will find ourselves in. That no matter the chaos, pain, uncertainty and messiness of the world around us, in 2024 we will be bringers of hope, and carriers of the Good News to everyone we encounter.