There is an ancient Roman god whose namesake carries the first month of our year. He is called Janus. Perhaps you have seen his depiction before? Janus was the double-faced (sometimes quadruple-faced) “deity” locked in a gaze perpetually and simultaneously looking backward and forward. He was the gatekeeper, the guardian of beginnings and endings, seer of the past and the future. His image was set in doors, portals and archways all over the Roman world, none of which was more prominent than the doors of his temple in the Roman Forum ritually opened in times of war and closed in (rare) times of peace. Janus was thought to govern during times of transition such as at marriage, birth, and death. But there was a nasty side to Janus as well; to be called Janus-faced was to be accused of duplicity and double-dealing as Shakespeare alluded, “Now, by two-headed Janus / Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time” (Merchant of Venice, Act i, Sc.1.)
I always felt “pity” for Janus, in a historical sense—if pity is the right word. He was a slave to his own dominion—locked in a double-existence—unable to relax his stare enough to focus upon or enjoy the present. He was in a prison of discontent looking out though the door’s peep-hole, yet never “being” in the room in which he found himself.
By glorious contrast to the invented deities of man’s religions stands the Lord Jesus Christ—the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the same yesterday, today, and forever. He is Lord over time, not subject to time, but amazingly He stepped into time in order to make Himself known to us in a way that we could understand. He is sovereign over happenings, not subject to them or merely gazing at them from a marbly, mute and catatonic state. Jesus is not a gatekeeper merely; He is the Gate, the Door. He is not bound merely to the past and future; He brings the past and the future into the knowable present—full of color and sensation and relationship.
The reason this mute demon called Janus comes to mind this January is fully connected to our beginnings and endings as a church family this January 2010 marked by our 20th anniversary as a local church. Unhesitatingly, it is not the “two-headed Janus” who “frames” our space or time governing over our beginnings and endings here in the 2010th year of our Lord or presiding over our 20th anniversary as Fellowship Bible Church of Siloam Springs. Nor is it some cold doctrine of Fate that steers the flow of time or space. Nor it is we ourselves who guard the threshold of this new year or guide our own transitions. It is our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who frames, governs, presides, steers, guards, and guides us—not in marble, but in glory—the true and living Head of the church. “Thus far the Lord has helped us” (1 Sam 7:12). Hallelujah!
