Festivals or Not:

Religious festivals …are a shadow …but reality belongs to Christ.

(Colossians 2:16-17)

The Apostle will not allow us to make a big deal about who keeps what festival (Col 2:16-18): “Do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or about religious festivals.” Our Puritan forbearers would have none of it—not even Christmas or Easter. For them, it was scripture alone—no need for all this church tradition. I suppose there’s the danger of enjoying the celebration—say, of Christmas, while forgetting what the festival is about: “reality belongs to Christ”.

But even if we were to erase every tradition: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holly Week, Easter, Ascension Thursday, and Pentecost Sunday; we’re still left with a calendar that can’t help pointing to Christ. Every time we jot down the date, we mark the years since Christ’s birth—the incarnation.

You may have noticed, the use of BCE “Before the Common Era” to replace BC “Before Christ”; and, CE “Common Era” to replace AD “Anno Domini” Latin for “Year of our Lord”. It’s not a bad attempt to secularize and universalize our calendar. It leaves space for those of us who believe to refer to BCE as “Before the Christian Era”, and CE as “Christian Era”.

BCE and CE still counts its days and years from something that happened 2019 years ago. I wonder what happened. Something so big we count our days before and after that something that happened. I’m sure folks will figure it out.

Much more radical attempts have been waged against our calendar that counts its days from that something that happened. The French Revolution, for example, insisted on their own calendar that counted its days before and after the Revolution. And, being thoroughly secular and scientific, developed a decimal division of the day into 10 hours, each hour of 100 minutes, and each minute gets 100 second. All very scientific. Holy days were removed—even Sunday. Instead, their revolutionary calendar, in accordance with the decimal principle, divided months into three 10 day decades. Something like that.

Other challenges could be mentioned—the Soviet Union gave it a try, so too the League of Nations planed for a “World Calendar”. Somehow, our calendar with its weeks (Biblical) and years marked by that something that happened 2019 years ago, still stands. Isn’t that something?