The Wheel, The Clock and the River

And what about the clock, whose best-known British representative now confronts a brash new neighbour across the river? The Millennium Wheel goes round, but goes nowhere (a gloriously inappropriate symbol for a moment of calendrical transition). The river runs into the sea, but the sea is not filled. Big Ben strikes the hours, and they disappear. Disappointing symbols for such a powerful reality.

"There was evening, and there was morning: the first day." And the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth. "And God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good." Good, yes, but incomplete. Going somewhere. Good but transient. Or should that be, good because transient?

Time sets the terms of the project. There is work to do. Look after the garden, name the beasts, reflect God's image into the world. And rest on the seventh day. Transience, like work, only becomes sad and dark after the fall.

Freeze the frame and you spoil the song. Photographs always lie. There are no action replays. You can't step into the same river twice. Arguably, you can't ever look at the same clock twice. And the wheel just goes on turning.

THE ancient Romans believed their history was going somewhere. At least, those who celebrated the rule of Augustus did so. The long story of Rome had reached its destiny. Virgil's Fourth Eclogue hailed the new age to be ushered in by Antony's and Octavia's coming boychild. (It turned out to be a girl.)

Hope sprang eternal. Pliny reapplied the "golden age" theme to Trajan; this time the Church demurred. So did the Stoics, for whom history was a vast wheel, descending into primordial fire every once in a (rather long) while, to be reborn, phoenix-like, and have everything happen identically all over again. All right if you happened to be an aristocrat. Many Stoics were.

Meanwhile, Jewish dreams of a Messiah had gone round in rather different circles. Complex chronological calculations matched strides with prayer and zeal in the effort to work out when the moment would come, when the clock would strike.

Akiba, in AD 132, reckoned Bar-Kochba was the Messiah. Other rabbis did their sums differently, and told the great sage that grass would be growing between his jaws before the Son of David appeared. They agreed that Something Should Happen, but quibbled about the date.

The Christians believed, as Albert Schweitzer put it, that Jesus had flung himself upon the great wheel of history, and that, though it had crushed him, it had begun to turn in the opposite direction. The clock had struck midnight upon Jesus's darkest hour. The new aeon had then dawned, the day for which Israel (explicitly) and the rest of the world (by extended implication) had been longing. If the earliest Christians had ever dreamed that there might be a Millennium to celebrate some day, they would have been unanimous in having it commemorate Easter.

Still, they didn't think that far ahead, and when Little Denis (Dionysius Exiguus, born about AD 465) worked out the scheme we now follow he went for Christmas as the turning point - or rather, for March 25, the day of Jesus's conception.

And he got the date wrong. I am writing this article about four years late; not untypical for a theologian's deadlines, but misleading when staging major celebrations. (Alternatively, on Dionysius's scheme, I am 15 months early, since his Millennium begins in March 2001. As my editor would tell you, I'm not normally that early, and intend to enjoy it while it lasts.)

SO, is it all nonsense? Is the belief that history might be going somewhere - that the passage of time is part of God's good creation rather than a mere wheel spinning round - any more than an amusing party game, passing the parcel around in a ring and hoping something exciting will happen when the music stops?

Yes, there is more. The millennial instinct, if we can call it that, stands for something profoundly Christian. Underneath the surface noise, away from the wheel, the river and even the clock, there is a distinction to be made, which insists not only that Christians are right to reclaim the Millennium in whatever way we can, but also that time itself is to be embraced, not as a treadmill but as a pilgrimage.

One part of our present cultural crisis is a depth of spiritual confusion in which (look at the bookshops and you'll see) people are so hungry for spiritual nourishment that they will gobble up anything. Anything, that is, as long as it isn't ordinary (mere?) Christianity, which is assumed, by the bookshops at least, to be boring and irrelevant. And one of today's great attractions is, yes, the wheel. The wheel of fortune. The Great Mandala, the wheel of life. Destiny as an endless roundabout.

Reincarnation: what would you like to be next time around? What were you last time? Can you get in touch with it, and perhaps - by an interesting mixture of low-grade Hinduism and even lower-grade psychotherapy - heal your previous self? There are plenty who'll help you try. Glen Hoddle got into trouble for this stuff, or rather for articulating its potential darker side (birth defects as punishment for sins in a former life).

Many who eschew such ideas nevertheless embrace some form of circular spirituality: round and round the wheel of life, with the chance at last of escaping into the Infinite. From the wheel to the river, from the river to the sea.

BUT when Jesus threw himself on the wheel he not only started it turning in the opposite direction; he detached it from its moorings and set it free. Kill the Lord of Life, and Death itself will start working backwards. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, he taught us to pray, on earth as it is in heaven. The wheel still turns; day follows night, harvest follows seedtime; but it isn't standing still. It's going somewhere.

A page on the calendar is a step on the pilgrim way, the kingdom way. The annual round of Jewish festivals pointed to God's mighty acts in the past, and on to the great coming liberation. The circularity of the church's calendar must always be subservient to the essential forward linear movement of God's kingdom, which is why Advent matters as a double season (heralding both the first and the second comings).

Imagine the sea flowing back upstream (desalinated en route, of course) to irrigate the parched land. Imagine debt working backwards, with remission and forgiveness the order of the day. Imagine Northern Ireland or the Balkans working backwards, with trust and reconciliation replacing suspicion. Imagine the Millennium Wheel claiming its freedom and whirling off up river, with panicking partygoers hanging on for dear life, and Big Ben's chimes growing fainter in the rear. God's time is moving in a new direction, challenging the ever-flowing stream in which death has the last word. If we are to celebrate the Millennium appropriately, we must see which way it's pointing.

And it's the resurrection that gives us the clue. Circular spiritualities always threaten to compromise with death, with the unmaking of God's good creation: death can have the physical side, we'll keep the spiritual one. No, says the Millennium (when rightly understood): redemptive time is linear, moving forwards (however paradoxically) towards the new creation that will complete and redeem the old. A baby's birth symbolises this; how much more does the resurrection. Schedule another party for 30 years hence. Or perhaps 26.

But make the present party a kingdom-party. The millennial instinct is not the same thing as "moving with the times". "Have you no idea of Progress, of Development?" splutters a character in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. "I have seen them both in an egg", replies the Prince; "we call it 'Going Bad' in Narnia."

We have seen them both in the last century of the old Millennium, and "going bad" is putting it mildly. Mere movement is irrelevant, a cultural St Vitus's Dance. What matters is where the movement is going. The great dream of Progress has left half the world crippled by debt and the other half paralysed by doubt.

Moving with the times got us into our present mess. It's time to move against the times, while there's still time. Chime that one out, Big Ben.