Around the dinner table recently, my family of five discussed our favorite season of the year. Two preferred the coziness of fall, one winter’s crispness with Christmas delights, two the summer’s change of pace and lengthened daylight.

I have noticed that individual believers and whole church communities tend to build their morals upon one key biblical season. Each shapes one’s imagination of what God’s peace is and how and when it comes to us.

Creation. Some seek peace in the restoration of God’s original intention for the world God made.

Fall. Others seek peace through rules and rhythms that preserve their relationship with God in a fallen world.

Redemption. Some practice peace in a community of the redeemed who embody an alternative to this world’s disintegrating social patterns.

Consummation. Still others commit themselves to the full and everlasting peace of God’s future reign, sometimes depicted as a new world.

Each season has its biblical touchpoints. Each requires moral imagination to become a guide for seeking God’s peace and following Jesus. Each shapes how we think, feel and act.

Of seasons and timelines

Much as the seasons of the year move along a timeline, so too do the biblical seasons structure time. If we imagine human history as an arrow moving forward, then we might place these biblical seasons along that timeline at the beginning, middle and end.

For those of us who are drawn to the seasons of Creation or Consummation, the timeline suggests a divine mandate to (re)fashion the world to reflect our view of God’s reign. Each fills in the picture differently.

The Creation view says peace is “back there,” so we must conserve the original order, as God intended.

The Consummation view says peace is “up ahead,” so we must progress toward the ultimate order, as God has promised.

The two remaining biblical seasons (Fall and Redemption) picture the arrow of history moving in a different direction: not horizontally from past to future but vertically between two poles.

The arrow sometimes points upward toward the fullness of God’s design (Redemption) and sometimes downward in the disintegration of a once-beautiful community (Fall). In either case, peace is found in movement toward the upper pole, where God reigns.

However, I believe it is not helpful to think of Creation, Fall, Redemption and Consummation along a timeline at all, biblical or otherwise.

Timeline thinking can lead to triumphalism, in which we look down on others who are stuck in the “wrong” part of the story. This can mix up our moral reasoning — for example, when we insist that our opinions represent God’s original intent, though we can only imagine the beginning from our place in the middle of the story, in a fallen world.

Timeline thinking can also obscure the ways in which each biblical season appears in our own lives — for instance, how the Fall is not just in the past but something we do.

Thinking with new pictures

I picture the “what, when and how” of God’s just and peaceable reign differently. Its nearness to our place in history is better understood, I propose, along the lines of recent popular depictions of a multiverse, like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse or Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Rather than thinking of history as a timeline with an arrow moving forward, I picture it as the setting in which we live. As characters in the middle of the story, we do not have access to, or control over, history’s beginning or its end.

Yet, here in the middle of the story, Jesus took on flesh. Without trying to prove his authority or working to establish his power within or over the political order, Jesus revealed the nature and the nearness of God’s reign.

I use the word “reveal” intentionally. Its Greek counterpart literally means “pulling back the curtain.”

When Jesus pulls back the curtain, what’s behind it is the fullness of God’s reign. This reign is real and certain. God’s authority and power are not in question. But how can this be true when it so often appears untrue in our experience?

When I picture Jesus revealing the nature and nearness of God’s reign, I see him reaching through space-time itself and pulling open the curtain so that we may see a reality truer, better and more beautiful than the one that surrounds us every day.

The peaceable reign of God is near at hand. It is true and real in a universe parallel to our own. Only those with eyes to see and ears to hear can perceive it.

As we embody God’s peace in our world, we pull back the curtain — patiently and powerfully opening portals between the timelines — so that God’s reign might pour through in its beauty and truth, peace and wholeness.

God’s reign is not making steady progress in our timeline. Rather, it is fleeting and fugitive. The curtain separates us from its fullness.

The curtain also preserves our freedom and our responsibility. It ensures that God’s ways of making an impact in our world are consistent with God’s loving, nonviolent character, leaving room for us to forge our own timelines.

May this Advent be more than a season. May it bring God’s peaceable reign to our world through gaps in the curtain held open by our hands.

Jacob Alan Cook is assistant professor of Christian ethics and program director for the new Doctor of Ministry in Peacemaking and Social Change at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. Through the Shalom Collaboratory, he is developing models to form church leaders for peacebuilding and conflict transformation. He is the author of Worldview Theory, Whiteness and the Future of Evangelical Faith.