The missing day

I once missed Christmas Day. I was aboard a London to NZ flight via Los Angeles and we jumped the date line around midnight. Goodbye presents! However something different happened this year – a day went missing by government fiat. In order to better align with its key trading partners, Samoa jumped the International Date Line and moved from 29 to 31 December in a digital stroke.

There’s nothing new or alarming in all that. Calendars are a human construct, have changed often enough during history and at any given moment different people operate on different calendars. For example, the recently newsworthy Mayan calendar runs alongside the more general western calendar in some societies. Or again, Singapore chooses to position itself out of its natural time zone for reasons of financial markets.

In the ancient near east, calendars were commonly constructed according to the reign and deeds of a king. For example, consider the Biblical formula ‘in the 8^th year etc of the reign of King so and so’.

This is reflected in the present BC / AD division of the western calendar which divides around the incarnation of Christ. Well, not quite … for present scholarly reckoning places his birth in about 6BC. Its interesting to see present discussion about renaming this into BCE / CE and thus writing Christ ‘out’. Some Christians see this as an issue of spreading secularism to contest. Personally, I don’t think its worth the fight.

Hmm .. constructing a calendar around the deeds of a king? Now that’s worth thinking about. Put simply, it locates us in the last days in between the ascension and the return of the Lord. That gives urgency to the task of witness and encouragement to persist in following and serving Jesus. We are indeed to ‘watch and pray’ and labour and serve, for our master may return from his journey any moment.

How terrible to be ill-prepared and thus to miss the day.