As each New Year rolls around I can’t help but think about the mental ‘gear-shifting’ that will be required to live in a New Year (e.g., writing ‘2007’ on bank checks, letters, invoices, receipts, etc.).  And just about the time I’ve got it down I find we’re again creeping up to another new year change.  What I also think about each new year—as I’m sure many followers of Jesus do—is the significance of the modern world using Anno Domini (In the Year of our Lord) to delineate one year from another.

The Anno Domini era calendar that we use today (calculated by the mathematician/astronomer monk, Dionysius Exiguus, or “Denis the Little,” in the 6th Century) is assumed to be dated from the birth of Jesus of Nazareth (which supposes that Jesus was born in A.D. 1).  However, from hind sight we now know that Augustus, the Roman Caesar or King who ruled during the birth of Jesus (Luke 2:1), ended his rule when he died in about 4 B.C.  And given a few other facts, such as King Herod’s command to kill children 2 years and younger (Matthew 2:16), it is more likely that Jesus was born sometime between 6-4 B.C. (for more on the dating of Jesus’ birth, see Paul Maier’s article, “The Times and Places of Jesus“).

What strikes me in all this is that the world marks it’s progression of time not with the rise of any great governmental or military leader, nor with the arrival of one great nation or another, but by the appearance of a Palestinian Jewish peasant.  A peasant who never wrote a book, constructed a building, or even traveled more than 200 miles from the place of his birth.  As someone has written, “He never did one of the things that usually accompany greatness.”   And yet, we mark the succession of our lives and world history by this apparent ‘nobody.’  A ‘nobody’ who, in comparison to all great world leaders and daunting empires, is boldly superior.

In his book, Jesus Among Other Gods, Ravi Zacharias quotes the words of skeptic turned follower of Jesus, Malcolm Muggeridge.  Muggeridge brilliantly writes:

We look back upon history, and what do we see? Empires rising and falling.  Revolutions and Counterrevolutions.  Wealth accumulated and wealth disbursed. Shakespeare has written of the rise and fall of great ones, that ebb and flow with the moon. I look back upon my own fellow countrymen, once upon a time dominating a quarter of the world, most of them convinced, in the words of what is still a popular song, that the God who made them mighty, shall make them mightier yet.I’ve heard a crazed, cracked Austrian announce to the world the establishment of a Reich that would last a thousand years.  I have seen an Italian clown say he was going to stop and restart the calendar with his own ascension to power.  I’ve heard a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin, acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the world as wiser than Solomon, more humane than Marcus Aurelius, more enlightened than Ashoka.I have seen America, wealthier and in terms of military weaponry, more powerful than the rest of the world put together, so that had the American people so desired, they could have outdone a Caesar, or an Alexander in the range and scale of their conquests.  All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone.  Gone with the wind.England part of a tiny island off the coast of Europe, threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy.  Hitler and Mussolini dead, remembered only in infamy.  Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he helped found and dominate for some three decades.  America haunted by fears of running our of those precious fluids that keeps their motorways roaring, and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam, and the victories of the Don Quixotes of the media as they charged the windmills of Watergate.  All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone.  Gone with the wind.

Zacharias concludes Muggeridge’s words with his own, “Behind the debris of these solemn supermen, and self-styled imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one, because of whom, by whom, in whom and through whom alone, mankind may still have peace: The person of Jesus Christ.  I present him as the way, the truth, and the life.”