The Ecstasy

The young man is sitting in a room with twenty other people. They begin to talk. One of them, his tutor, though not his teacher, asks a question about memory and time and the confession of the self to God. His good friend sitting across the table answers her, and this one tells those at the table about Christ the Mediator between God and humans. The young man sits waiting for the sentence to finish, enthralled by each word, wondering what the next one will mean with the last. When the succession of words is done, the whole is present (and there the grammarian would put a period). The young man no longer listens and waits, since what was said is now said completely and there is no need to wait for what’s already complete. The succession of words is wrapped up neatly; words have become a word.
The friend takes in a breath after he finishes speaking, and the young man sits straighter in his seat. If there were a clock in the room, it would tick. If the ceiling were gone, he could see the clouds and stars and moon drift by in their ways. For a moment, though, he forgets that time is “passing by”: a timeless moment.
He remembers what he’d heard the Father say. The word from his friend becomes to him like a word from God, and it captures him.

For a thousand years in Your sight
Are like yesterday when it passes by,
Or as a watch in the night. (Ps. 90:4)

God’s day never passes away. His thousands of thousands of years are His today. Today is a day that the Lord has already made. The young man thinks about the Mediator, who eternally is, and who yet came and will come. God traded his immortality in eternity for mortality in time, but the God-man brought sinlessness with Him to make void death and clothe the mortal with immortality, the temporary with eternity. Humans who are diminished by the succession of moments and days and months and years met the One called “Eternal Father,” who let Himself pass away so that He could take what had passed away—that is, His body—and raise it up to be what never passes away. And,

When He ascended on high,
He led captive a host of captives. (Eph. 4:8)

The young man is caught up and snatched away from the table by this. He is not worried about tomorrow. He is not frustrated by yesterday. He does not “live in the moment.” He lives today, forever today, in the kingdom of his Father. He sits in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, like the apostle said. With God.
But for his own heart, one beat after the next, he would forget time altogether—as the dead do seem to forget. But he remembers, and he hears the voices of the room, the words one after another. Suddenly he’s waiting again. He’s imperfect and passing away. But he’s a child of God, like his friend across the table. They are “sons of eternity in time.” Their hope is not expectation for the future, and their faith is not assurance in remembered past experience. They hope in today, and they wait for it in the succession of days. Their faith is in eternity, where the One who was and is and is to come is. For a time they are at the table, filled with the Holy Spirit, but the while will pass, and the now will come forever. Soon.