Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir. Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods. But now that you know God—or rather are known by God—how is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable principles? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again? You are observing special days and months and seasons and years! I fear for you, that somehow I have wasted my efforts on you. Galatians 4: 6 - 11 NIV
One of the most amazing things about the Christian Faith is its calendar.
Given Christianity’s origins as the faith that emerged from Judaism with its rigorous calendar, isn’t it rather amazing that we are not celebrating the Feasts of the Old Testament assiduously?
To be sure, some sects in the modern day have tried to recreate those, but by and large, the coming of Jesus Christ into the world broke mankind’s devotion to the calendars of the pagans - and even the Old Testament calendar. Allow an explanation.
Judaism from the Exodus onward has followed a lunar calendar. One sure sign of repentance for the ancients of Israel was their return to the practice of the calendar as in 2 Kings 23. One might think that since the Hebrew calendar itself pointed to the coming Messiah, the New Testament would encourage us to follow it as well. What better example to follow?
But in reality, the early church focused only on a small segment of Hebrew calendar… the Passover reinterpreted through the lens of Our Lord’s Passion (1 Corinthians 5: 6-8) and Pentecost as it was transformed by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit as the sign of Christ’s reign at the right hand of God the Father (Ephesians 4). Perhaps that’s because the general theme of the New Testament is that Jesus Christ fulfills the Torah. He even brings an end to the significance of the Old Testament calendar. In Paul’s letter to the Galatians they were warned that observing a calendar that had its intrinsic focus on something less than Christian - even one with such a distinguished pedigree - was nothing less than a return to spiritual slavery.
Why might that be?
Because it distracts us from the essential Christian doctrine of justification by faith.
The Galatians were being told that they would enter the fullness of Christ only by becoming Jews. Israel’s history showed that entering the fullness of the Father’s blessing by obedience to the Torah was a failed endeavor entirely. Only in Christ can we, Jews and Gentiles, receive the fullness of the Father’s blessing.
“Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. 3For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man,in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.” (Romans 8: 1 - 4)
Going back to the Torah and its calendar would return them to a world of spiritual powerlessness and ultimate hopelessness - a world where the Messiah was not known. Paul called that bit of religious nostalgia “going back to weak and miserable principles” because they portrayed a world that did not know Jesus Christ as the Risen Lord whose reign was confirmed by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Paul makes a similar statement in Colossians 2 though we are not sure if he is speaking to a primarily Jewish or ProtoGnostic or Jewish-ProtoGnostic sect! Nevertheless, Paul still calls any return to a Christless calendar or Christless system of viewing the world as empty, hollow, and deceptive.
Heeding Paul’s warnings, the Christian Church developed a uniquely Christian calendar that focused the truths of the Apostle’s Creed as they unfold throughout the year so that believers could walk with Christ’s kingship fully in mind throughout the year. The Christian calendar evolved and had to be reformed in the West. But whether we are speaking about the Continental Reformers who retained the so-called “Evangelical Feasts” of the Christian year or the Congregationalists who preferred to exalt the weekly Lord’s Day, our forefathers in the United Church of Christ and all “mainline” churches shared a common view of the calendar. For them a calendar, as way of organizing our lives and time, had to be Christocentric. A Christian view of time required them to conceive of time in terms that were inseparable from the fundamental facts of the Apostle’s Creed.
As some choose to “celebrate” the “winter solstice” as a means of “affirming interfaith connections”, we must ask if we are doing the most unloving thing conceivable to the friends to whom we are attempting to demonstrate good will. Are we ourselves thereby returning to a world that does not acknowledge history’s most important fact: the Resurrection of Jesus Christ? And by doing that are we continuing to subject ourselves and our supposed friends to more time in the darkness of unbelief?
