How long, O Lord? The question is posed repeatedly by the Psalmist. It continues to be posed across the ages, uttered even by our lips in the shadows of a dark season. How long must I suffer this illness? Drag through this labor? Bear with evil men? Did not our Lord himself wonder this aloud (Mark 9:19)?
The underlying motive for such a prayer is often an instrumental hope: a plea to fix the problems we face. “How long” is fueled by the more stark and pressing “How?” How to bring this to an end, how to make this right? Time here seems a kind of matter, raw material malleable in my hands or my enemies’, or by luck or blessing, God’s. Our petition amounts to: Shorten the time; repair the time; shape the time.
The instrumental conception of time is driven by an understandable pastoral challenge: We need help getting through time by making time work for us, and tips and tools are in great demand. Preaching and teaching thrive on temporal instrumentalism, on making the most of the time allotted. Congregations and classrooms rise and fall on this basis. And not just today. The Christian tradition of Scripture-reading and catechesis has been driven by “tropology,” the discernment of the “moral sense” of Scripture so that we can do the great work of “applying” the Bible to “real life.” In this light, Scripture reveals the “how-to’s” of remaking time: Abraham on how to have faith, Joseph on how to be prudent, Esther on how to be brave . . . and Jesus on how to suffer quietly and be resurrected as a reward.
