Yesterday’s column discussed a little-known fact: the Sunday that The Church dedicates to John the Baptist is the Sunday which is nearest to June 21, the longest day of the year.
The longest day of the year is, of course, halfway between the two shortest days, the preceding and following December twenty firsts. December 21 is always the shortest day that’s near the beginning of the year and is also the shortest day that’s near the end of the year. The longest day, June 21, comes between them.
This is an allegory. The Church seems to be telling us, very quietly, that just as John the Baptist appears halfway through the year, he also appears halfway from the beginning of time to the end of time. In Catholic Fundamentalism, John the Baptist is “high noon” of the Creation Program.
Many people who lived around 1,000 A.D. asked “Are we running out of time?” John the Baptist fit neatly between the people living around 1,000 A. D. and David, who lived two thousand years before, around 1,000 B.C. Today, it appears that dating the beginning from the Coronation of David was wrong because the end did not come in 1000 A.D.
Is John the Baptist midway between the early days of Creation and the end? It’s hard to find when The Creation Program began. The actual date of writing The Creation Program is different than the date of its download, just as the starting and finishing dates for programming big, complicated 3-D movies are earlier their release dates.
It’s further complicated because the Bible emphatically states that “To God, a day is like a thousand years.” If the six or seven days of Creation are 24 hours long, Creation took place somewhere around 6,000 B.C. Adding 6 or 7 “Creation Days” that are each a thousand years long puts the beginning at 12-13,000 B.C.
If that is true, and John the Baptist is mid-point, the end of the world would be 10-11,000 years in the future.
The beginning of the period in which John the Baptist was the central point may have a parallel in human law. In law, the beginning date of a specified period may start when parties agree to a contract. We could reasonably date this time from God’s Covenant with Abraham, around 2,000 B.C. When we do that, we see that John the Baptist is at the midpoint of time between the Covenant and us. The sanest question that we, who live 2,000 years after John, can ask is “Are we running out of time?”
Why is “Are we running out of time?” the sanest question we can ask? The sanest thing anyone can ever do is avoid the worst thing that can reasonably be anticipated. Eternal pain for willful disobedience is something that can reasonably be anticipated.
Only the demons who live to inflict that pain, or those under their influence, would have any another opinion. So, when we ask “Are we running out of time?”, we may wish to answer, with equal reasonableness, “Very possibly.” and amend our lives so as to minimize eternal risk.
