Luke, Sacred Time, and the Church

Greystone Conversations

To an extent which must be amusing to some, surprising to others, and perhaps even a bit unsettling to still others, all year long Greystone seems to be asking the question, what time is it? Is this a question the Scriptures themselves invite us to ask?

From Genesis forward, including the long history of the Church since Pentecost, the people of God have recognized, confessed, and taught the theological significance of marking time. This conviction and practice is rooted in the determination to locate time among the things of creation, and thus not as an eternal attribute of God or some eternal principle existing alongside him. As part of creation, time derives its meaning and purpose not from the principles of history as such, or from purely pragmatic concerns of human and national life, nor even from general theological realities such as our doctrine of providence, but from that reality which is prior to and accounts for all of these: the Son of God himself. Time, biblically, derives its form (and thus its meaning and function) from the Son, as all features of the ritual realty of creation do. Thus biblical scholars and theologians, sensitive to how God himself explains these things, rightly point to the sun, moon, and stars of the Genesis creation narrative and the installation of Israel’s festal calendar in Lev. 23 as constitutive and formative of the relationship God’s people have to time. Scholars have also demonstrated, at great length, that this is not unique to the OT nor limited to a pre-Christ state of affairs but obtains in the NT as well. This is especially the case in work on the Gospel of John, which orders the early Church’s liturgical life by telling the story of Jesus not merely as the typological fulfillment of but also as the original and abiding meaning of that festal calendar: the form of the Son accounted for the festal calendar and his contours of birth, life, humiliation, death, resurrection, ascension, blessedness, and the like, are traced out for us in every generation by the contours of time itself, when properly interpreted and described. Thus the Church marks her time throughout the year by the same contours, though on the other side of the empty tomb, with the language often used for these contour points, namely, the so-called evangelical feast days.
For this episode of Greystone Conversations, Dr. Mark A. Garcia sits down with a longtime friend of Greystone’s, Jack Franicevich, a teacher and an Anglican clergyman. Jack has written a book on how Luke’s gospel uses the OT’s liturgical institutions, including the festal calendar, to frame a new history for the Church, one that includes the special character of the Lord’s day. As Jack notes, Luke is the only NT theological historian to tell not one but two stories that each begin with the phrase, “on the first day of the week.”
Besides publishing his research on Luke and sacred time in the life of the Church, Jack is also going to lead a Greystone microcourse in Coraopolis, PA and online exploring this subject matter this coming spring 2023. If you’re listening to this episode before that time, we heartily encourage you to consider signing up for this online and on-site micro-course as soon as you can.