A person viewed from above, sat in an armchair with a laptop on their knee - all framed by the aged face of a clock. Photo: By Kevin Ku on Unsplash.
Bide your time: Damian Entwistle’s Thought for the Week
‘We stand at the fulcrum of events.’
Our word for time comes from the Latin, tempus, but we retain echoes of an older Greek word, kronos, which we bring out for particular purposes; we see it ‘chronometer’, and ‘chronology’.
During the Renaissance this usage became identified with the Titan Kronos, who was father to Zeus. When Zeus overthrew Kronos, he exiled him to be the keeper of days: old father time, a kindly old duffer with a scythe and an hour-glass. But Kronos also became rather more fierce, and feared, as the personification of Death, still carrying his scythe, but with more menace. He gathers us all, eventually.
So we have been conditioned by language and culture to see kronos – time – as pitiless, remorseless, and inexorable. Its slow cadence measures the span of all things, the inevitable winding down of the mechanism. Its arrow points in one direction only.
But the Greeks had another word for time: kairos. We are (perhaps) much less familiar with this word, and we suffer from the lack of familiarity. If kronos is without hope, kairos is hopeful. Where kronos points to inevitability, kairos suggests opportunity. If kronos makes us brood upon decline, kairos says: this is the critical moment, we stand at the fulcrum of events.
There is one place I know of where kairos abounds, but its weight and significance is veiled from us: the gospels. This particular word is used on eighty-six occasions in the New Testament. It makes its appearance early, and persists. It’s a clanging bell, but the resonance is muted by translation. Take Mark 1:14 &15: ‘Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news”.’ Mark is telling us not to be burdened by the old ways. God’s plan is active in the world. Now. As God promised it would be. Wake up. Believe. Respond.
Substituting kairos for kronos in our mindset might go a long way to dispelling time’s gloomy shadow. Bathed in this light, expounding the future of British Quakerism might be more of a rallying cry than a death-knell.
There’s one more Greek word, used by Mark in the quotation above, which I’d like to draw attention to. That word is ‘repent’.
Once again, time and usage have shifted the ground upon which this word was originally founded. ‘Repent’ has become almost synonymous with a feeling of sadness and regret about things that we’ve done. It is becoming one-dimensional. But the original Greek for ‘repentance’ – metanoia – does not place its emphasis there. Instead it urges us to ‘think differently’, to ‘change our mindset’, to shift our perspective. This is why Mark uses it, and why he combines it with kairos. If we allow it to, if we unstop our ears, it will resonate as loudly for us as it did for the early hearers of the gospel.
Let’s attend to Mark. Wake up. Believe. Respond.
Comments
The translation of the gospels by Sarah Ruden (an American Quaker) has a fascinating glossary in which she explains many of her translation choices and how they differ from those we are used to in the King James version. Well worth reading.
By Lucy P on 9th February 2025 - 8:57
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