The New Year is generally a time of mixed emotions and the older you get – I have now lived in seven generations, the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, 00’s (noughties) & 10’s – the more bitter sweet it becomes.
A few years back, when we celebrated the new millennium – which we did twice in fact, once at the end of 1999 and once at the end of 2000 – I had to give one or two addresses and, as a result, came across a sermon by the now deceased German pastor and theologian Helmut Thielicke. This offers a penetrating and, in my view, profoundly helpful insight into the significance of the New Year. Please permit me a fairly lengthy quotation.
Before it strikes twelve on New Year’s Eve we shall all be keeping our eyes glued to the clock. But this gaze will be different from the quick look we take at our wrist watch to see if we shall get to an appointment on time or to see whether the train has already left. On this last night of the year when we look at the clock we shall have a rather special and hard to define feeling. At other times we use the clock in order to move according to what it says, in order to be at such and such a place on time. But on New Year’s Eve we do not move at all; we sit in the company of friends or perhaps in a room by ourselves. Then, suddenly, it is time, instead of us that moves. The last minutes of the old year have come. And for a moment we hear the stream of time, which is otherwise so noiseless, beginning to murmur aloud as it plunges over the weir of this out-of the-ordinary midnight. One must be very blasé or very stupid if one does not feel a little shiver going down one’s back when it happens. Why is it that on this night we have this completely different sense of time?
The reason that we experience time so utterly differently in this midnight hour than we do at other times lies in the fact that our clocks are round!... Because our clocks are round, because the hands circle about an constantly return to their starting point, we acquire illusion that everything in life repeats itself, that we can always make a fresh start…. On the last night of the year, however, we experience time in a different way. Then all at once time no longer moves in a circle, but in a straight line. There are no such things as round ‘year clocks’ which begin afresh at number twelve after the passage of 365 days. We should have to visualise such a yearly chronometer quite differently; it would have to be straight line on which very lapsed year was marked off as a small segment. And all our life would creep along this line of time. We leave behind us one segment after another. The hand never returns to where it was before. Once decisions have been made we can never cancel them out.
The line of time we spoke of is like a long corridor with many doors. Year after year we open a new one. But on its other side there is no latch or knob. We cannot go back and begin anew, as the hand on the clock does. And one day – we know when or where – the corridor will come to an end – irrevocably. The circular line on the dial of our clock, however, never comes to an end. That’s why it lulls us in the illusion that it will always keep us going. The ancient hour glasses with their running sands were more honest in this respect!
As I said, a penetrating analysis. Where does it leave us? With a realistic sense of our finitude? Certainly. With the dull ache of regret. More than likely. In despair? Never! As Christians we know that not only is God greater than time, but that Jesus Christ, by his resurrection, has shown Himself to be its Lord. Thus the future, the world’s and ours, is His.
May I, then, encourage you to enter the New Year with realism, but also with faith, taking as your guide the prayer of King George VI - of ‘The King’s Speech’ fame - which concluded his address to the British Commonwealth on Christmas Day 1939
I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year, 'Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.' And he replied, 'Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be better than light, and safer than a known way.
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