What would you do with one day more?

A leap year creates opportunities.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Associate Minister at Holy Trinity Clapham, London.

Looking straight down on someone sitting in an armchair working on a laptop. They are surrounded by clock numerals and hands on the floor.

Kevin Ku on Unsplash.

We're all going into extra time. If you've found yourself thinking, 'If only I had some more time', then this is the year for you. Congratulations. So how are you going to make the most of the extra day we're gifted? In a leap year, the 29th February square sits quietly there on the calendar, with little fanfare, unless you're one of the unfortunate souls to be celebrating your quadrennial birthday. But it's not just another Thursday. It's redemption time if you've ever flown east across the international date line and wondered where that day disappeared, never to return.

When you think about extra time in football, the pressure is only heightened, the anticipation and trepidation palpable. Willy Wonka - no, not the recent foppish Timothée Chalamet, but Gene Wilder – famously got muddled when he feverishly announced, 'We have so much time, and so little to do!' Unlike Otis Redding, sittin' on the dock of the bay, wasting time, we have learnt to squeeze more and more into our days, making the most of the time.

I'm not immune. I've recently begun using an AI app for scheduling meetings and tasks. This app promises to turbocharge my productivity by 137 per cent. Somehow it boasts, 'There are now 13 months in a year'. Of course, there's little way of measuring just how super-duper-extra-productive this is going to make me but so far, I still seem to only have seven days in my week. So, if we were to stop spinning on our hamster wheels of productivity for a moment, and take a look at time (given with this extra day we have the time to do so), how might we make the most of it?

The essence of time must mean both its quality and its quantity.

It's worth measuring not only how much time we have, but the quality of the time we have. We know how to measure time, but how do we measure this measure? Time is of the essence. But what is the essence of time? For Charles Dickens, the best of times and the worst of times went hand-in-hand. The apostle Paul warned the church in Ephesus to make the most of every opportunity, 'because the days are evil'. Is time neutral? Perhaps we should ask the women and children of Afghanistan after the Doha agreement was signed on the last 29th February, with ominous consequences. Every day has the capacity for good and evil, including in a leap year. And if the days are evil, then as we consider how we live, as the King James Version puts it, that we can 'redeem the time'.

Then there's not only redeeming the time in terms of its quality, but also its quantity. Eventually, one day (quite some time away), HS2 will mean there's 32 minutes 'saved' for those travelling between Birmingham and London. And how many times have you said or heard recently that you've 'run out of time'? Our society treats time as a scarce commodity. There's regret over the time that we have wasted on an unworthy Netflix offering, on doom-scrolling, or that time in the post office queue we'll never get back.

I recently went to a memorial service of a friend who died in her early 60s. It was not only a sober reminder that we don't know how much time we have, but also an inspiration to live like someone who made the most of her days, by helping others to make the most of their time.

The essence of time must mean both its quality and its quantity. Richard Curtis' film About Time invites us into the relationship between a father and son who have the power to travel through time. While the lesson learnt is that we have the power to make the most of every day, the bulk of the film is really about the relationship. Any time he wants, the son can escape back to Cornwall and play table tennis or skim pebbles along the water with his dad. These experiences beyond his own linear timeline teach him how to live in his present reality.

Christianity also invites us to live in the love between a Father and a Son, and from that place we keep time. Jesus spoke about eternal life: not only a quantity of life beyond death, but a quality of life that we can experience beginning today. Sure, we can't escape the reality of any of the worst times around us, but we can invite the best of times of eternity into today. Maybe our relationship with time is so fraught because we were made to live beyond time.

The wristband on my watch recently fell apart. I suppose you could say I've been walking around without time on my hands. Time doesn't need to be elusive, slipping away from us. Time, just like the day, can be seized and grasped. King David wrote of God: 'my times are in your hands'. A leap year gives us a whole extra day of deadlines, potential ephemeral joys and sorrows. Perhaps putting our hope not in today, nor tomorrow, but into the hands of the maker of time is the greatest leap.

Article

Creed

Leading

14 October 2024

5 min read

The Nicene Creed: a 1,700-year-old game changer

Why we should celebrate the Council of Nicaea today.

Jane Williams

Jane Williams is the McDonald Professor in Christian Theology at St Mellitus College.

A ink drawing of Constantine the Emperor on a throne listening to people showing him books.

Constantine and the council.

Wikimedia Commons.

The are not many 1,700-year-old documents that are read out loud every week and known by heart by millions of people across the world. The Nicene Creed is one of them. In 2025 it will be 1,700 years since the Council of Nicaea was called by the Emperor Constantine, and came up with the first version of the Creed. Next year will be full of conferences planned to interrogate and reassess but, mostly, to thank God for the Nicene Creed

But many people will be bewildered, which is a polite way of saying ‘indifferent’ or even ‘hostile’, to this outpouring of Nicaea-mania. Lots of people don’t know the Creed at all, or, if they do, they see it as dogmatic, exclusionary and couched in the arcane language of fourth century classical philosophy, which seems to have little relevance to the world we live in today. Is it really worth celebrating? Let me suggest some reasons why I think it is.

Suddenly, Christians had a chance to shape the world, to shape culture, from the top down as well as from the bottom up.

First of all, 325 marked a period of huge transition for the Christian faith. For the previous 300 years since the time of Jesus, Christianity had been spreading surprisingly rapidly, but generally without support from the wealthy or powerful, and suffering regular persecution. But at the beginning of the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine declared himself to be a ‘Christian’. There is a lot of debate about what he meant by that – it didn’t stop him from murdering most of his family, for example. But Constantine ascribed his victorious Imperial campaign to the protection of the Christian God, and began to offer safety and privilege to Christians and their leaders. It was Constantine who called the Council of Nicaea, wanting to assert his own authority but also wanting this nascent ‘institutional’ Church to get a grip and unite behind him. Suddenly, Christians had a chance to shape the world, to shape culture, from the top down as well as from the bottom up. Whether this is a good thing or a bad one, and what it did and does to the character of Christian faith in the 1,700 years since Nicaea is undoubtedly something that 2025 will have to examine.

Secondly, the Council of Nicaea offered a model of decision-making that has been profoundly important in Christian life ever since. Nicaea was deliberately chosen as the place to hold this council because it sat roughly on the dividing line between the Eastern part of the Roman Empire, where Greek was the lingua franca, and the Western part, where Latin was the language of public discourse. Constantine was seeking to establish himself as sole emperor over both parts, and he called together at Nicaea Christian leaders from across the Empire. We have a good idea of who was there because of the signatories to the resolutions of the Council.

Leaders came from some of the most sophisticated, wealthy and educated parts of the Roman Empire, like Alexandria, with its famous school and library. But they also came from some of the simplest parts, where peasant life was the norm for both the bishop and the congregations. St Spiridion, now the patron saint of Corfu, was one of the signatories; he maintained his hard life as shepherd while leading his human flock; St Nicholas of Myra, whom we now know as Santa Claus, was there, too; altogether there were probably 200 to 300 bishops there, highlighting the extraordinary spread of Christian faith across the Roman Empire. That is why the Council of Nicaea is called the First Ecumenical or world-wide Council. This was the first opportunity for the Church to take stock of itself and to notice and learn from its diversity.

This is a game-changing concept, both for theology and for anthropology.

This model of ‘conciliar’ discussion has remained key to the way in which Christians try to resolve conflict and make decisions, by meeting, discussing, praying and hearing from voices and experiences that represent the whole diversity of humanity. No one can pretend that the Council of Nicaea was exactly such a process – no women were part of the consultation, for one thing – but the intention was significant. In our own time of deep disagreement between Christians, a commitment to the Nicene method of consultative decision-making would be a good focus for examination of 1,700 years of trying to listen to each other, even if we often fail.

Thirdly, and most importantly of all, of course, the Council of Nicaea produced the Nicene Creed, a succinct statement of what Christians affirm about God and the world because of the paradigm-changing life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. The short, clear statements of faith in the Creed were hard-fought for and not accepted by everyone, then or now. They became necessary as people tried out different descriptions of who Jesus is in relation to God, which brought out more and more clearly how fundamental this question is for our understanding of God, and so our understanding of our own purpose and destiny. Some suggested that Jesus was just an exceptionally gifted human being, favoured by God. But the world has been full of great prophets, most of whom receive lip-service at best, but make no actual difference. Others proposed that Jesus was God, wearing a disguise but not really, actually, human, suggesting that God can’t really commit to the created order. The most popular suggestion in the fourth century, put forward by a learned teacher called Arius, was that Jesus is something in between, not the eternal God, but not just a human being either. But that’s the worst of all worlds: we can’t trust what Jesus shows us either about God or about human beings.

All of these ‘solutions’ protected God’s transcendence and otherness – God is above and beyond created existence and divinity cannot or will not sully itself with the earthly, historical lives that human beings live.

The radical suggestion of the Nicene Creed, trying to be faithful to the witness of the Bible, is that Jesus is really God, living among us, but also really a human being, born into a particular time and place in history and dying a real, historical death. And that must mean that the Almighty God doesn’t think it compromises God’s power and majesty to come and share our lives. Imagine the dignity that gives us and our lives – God loves and honours the world and thinks that a human life is capable of showing us the nature of God. But it also means that the full life-giving power of God is not just ‘outside’ but ‘inside’ the world.

This is a game-changing concept, both for theology and for anthropology.

To find out more about the McDonald Agape Nicaea Project being held by St. Mellitus College in London, come and join the public lectures, or look out for other Nicene celebrations in 2025.

Participants will hear from some of the world’s leading scholars on various issues related to Nicaea, including Professor Khaled Anatolios, Dr. Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Professor Ilaria Ramelli, Professor Bruce McCormack, Dr. Willie James Jennings, and many more.

A significant part of the Nicaea conference in 2025 will be a call for papers, expanding dialogue on the topic and hearing from a wide array of voices.

For more information or to register for these events, you can visit the Nicaea Project website

The Nicaea Project