Kairos and pleroma

I’m not a real Greek scholar, but I occasionally play one on television, to misquote a famous Robert Young commercial from decades ago.

I did take two semesters of New Testament Greek in college, though. The class was taught by a jovial Roman Catholic priest with a delightful sense of humor. This was the era of the “new linguistics”, in which there was a de-emphasis on rote memorization in favor of an analytical, structural understanding of the rules of the language system. Of course, this didn’t account for all the exceptions to the rules, of which Greek has many. “Why do they use an omega there?” I would ask, with a puzzled look. “Because they can!” the priest would exclaim triumphantly. This struck me as something less than an explanation, but I was young then, something that can no longer credibly be said about me.

In learning Greek, though (to what extent I did), I found that the world of the New Testament opened up to me, because so many things defy nuanced translation. If one isn’t careful, though, this can lead to some academic snobbery that is almost malodorous. I recall accompanying a friend to a Sunday school class at his church, which was a favorite of students who attended the local seminary. He was dating a woman at the time who liked the Living Bible, which was mostly a paraphrase of a paraphrase, written in the vernacular of the day. She opened it to read a passage aloud, and sitting next to her was a rather dour fellow who silently opened his trilingual Bible (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek) to the same section. “That’s not what it says in the Septuagint,” he intoned. Well, few things are.

I do find that Hebrew and Greek words (I can’t read Aramaic, but I know a guy) contain lexical depths that get lost in any English version. For instance, the word for “fullness” or “completeness”, pleroma, contains echoes of the early battle between apostolic orthodoxy and the rise of the Gnostic heretics. And the fact that there are two words for “time” in Greek delights me: chronos, the numbered time we measure with clocks and calendars, and kairos, the narrative time of the appointed hour, the opportune moment, the instant of long-awaited fulfillment. To me, words trump numbers; what we recall at the end of our days, argues Daniel Kahneman, are the significant turning points of our narrative, and in the final analysis, we are our remembering selves.

As I write these words, it is once again Holy Saturday, the “day with no name”, suspended in between the pathos of Good Friday and the victory of Easter Sunday. (My church calls the latter Resurrection Sunday, which I like, but there is no truth to the story that the word “Easter” derives from “Ishtar”.) It is the day of waiting, when the world is silent, and everything seems lost in a fog of confusion. Even to those of us who know the end of the story, there is a solemn recognition that we are not yet at the end of the story, but are caught in a liminal space. And the time of waiting has its purpose, too; you can’t push the river, but the river carries you.

The New Testament speaks of redemption in three verb tenses: believers have been saved, are being saved, and will be saved. Theologians call these aspects of the spiritual journey justification, sanctification, and glorification; and the middle aspect is a slow, uneven journey. It is like being engaged but not yet married, or like having completed all one’s college coursework but not yet at the commencement ceremony. When I first realized, in high school, that the word “commencement” means a beginning, not an ending, I was stunned. I felt as if I was about to leave the only world I had ever known, which was true. But I didn’t yet realize emotionally that a larger world awaited. And this mortal life is like that as well. “Do you think that death is like falling asleep?” a patient once asked Viktor Frankl. “No, I think it is probably more like waking up,” he replied. It’s best to set an alarm, by the way.

So I wait the fullness, the completion, the pleroma, which has not yet arrived, though I have a down payment. In college, I had a friend who wore a large silver ring on the third finger of his left hand to signify his closeness to God. “What will you do if you ever get married?” I asked him, concerned about the value of my stock holdings in the jewelry sector. “I’ll get a thinner ring and add it,” he responded. This is what medieval scholars called “the ordering of the loves”, or knowing what is most important, underneath which all other valuable things arrange themselves in a harmonious order that comes from having right priorities. We all need a still point in a turning world, and so we are told to set our affections (“position our midriff” in the literal Greek) on things above, where Christ is. Then earthly blessings can be cherished, but not worshipped, as the good but transient things that they are; for we are secure when the things that cannot be shaken remain.