There I am, in sixth grade, sitting next to the phone. My heart is racing. I have to call her. As much as a sixth grader can love, I love this girl. Now of course, I haven’t really had a conversation with her. But I did have a friend pass a note to one of her friends to give to her! It must be true love. So I dial the number, and immediately I hang up. I can’t do it right now. But I must. So I dial again—and I wait for one ring—and hang up. Yikes, this is too much. I think my heart is going to jump out of my chest. Courage Aaron, courage. I dial again, one ring, two rings—an answer. It’s her mom. She’s not home. She just left the house. Praise the Lord I say to myself. I won’t have to be having that conversation quite yet. I guess it wasn’t quite the right time to make the call. I begin to realize at a young age: sometimes perfect timing is everything.
There were two words to describe time in the Greek language that were used when Jesus lived. Chronos and Kairos. Chronos is our common understanding of time. It is the time of a clock. It helps to mark our days and it helps us to attend to our meetings and responsibilities. Kairos, however, is something different. Kairos refers to the perfect time, the fullness of time, the opportune time. The time when everything seems to come together just perfectly. Chronos, in one sense, is the time for human beings. Where kairos is the time of God. And yet, as we see in today’s Gospel, sometimes kairos meets chronos. For perfect timing is everything.
Imagine our universe: 13.7 billion years old. Our galaxy: 13.2 billion years old. Our solar system: 4.6 billion years old. And our earth: 4.5 billion years old. On our earth approximately 108 trillion people have walked, 700 billion of those which are alive right now, at this time. And yet in all that chronos time, with all of those people, a karos event took place some two thousand years ago. God could have chosen any time, any place, and any person. And yet he knew the proper kairos. He knew when to choose to send an angel to visit a lowly Jewish woman from Nazareth, a woman named Mary. This was the perfect time, the opportune time, the fullness of time for God to prepare the way to visit his people. It was just the right time for salvation, joy, peace and love to come. Sometimes perfect timing is everything.
John and Cindy were a newly married couple. Since their wedding night they faithfully remained open to having children. They longed and desired for this to happen. Yet month after month went by, and they soon became worried, scared, disheartened. Upon visiting the doctor they found that Cindy had certain conditions that would complicate her ability to become pregnant. They were devastated. Yet as a couple they kept trying, praying, waiting. In their struggle and fears they grew closer in their marriage. They grew closer to God. And one morning Cindy ran from the bathroom to the bedroom where she found John. He knew in her eyes what message she bore. Nine months later, she held her precious daughter in her arms. That moment, that time, had been made perfect by God.
There are so many things in our life that we long to happen. We need to sell our house. We want our semester to be finished. We wish that guy or girl in our science class would just notice us. We cry at night wondering if we will ever experience true love. We wonder if this time of sickness will come to pass. We long for kairos to meet chronos. We long for the perfect time.
It was no different for the ancient Israelites. They had suffered. They had been exiled. They had experienced great loss. And yet they still waited for a savior. And God was faithful. With the words that we pray so often, “Hail, full of grace. The Lord is with you.” Something happened for us all. Chronos became kairos when the Lord and God of kairos came to dwell among the chronos.
From that moment there can be no mistaking it: God holds all time in his hands. He knows and will bring about, when the moment is right, the joy that we desire, the deep longings in our heart, the love that will make us whole. We only need to try to do what Mary did. Casting aside all fear, we place our lives in his hands. For he is the author and perfecter of all that we could desire. He is perfect timing. And we no longer have to wait. This Advent season—this Christmas season, is a reminder that kairos has met chronos. The perfect time is now.
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