Oldies

When did Sting, Lionel Richie, Phil Collins, Eric Clapton and Vince Gill become "oldies"?  It seems the last time I consciously pondered it, "oldies" stations on the radio featured The Platters, Roy Orbison and various girl-groups ending in "—ettes."  But now the only new songs I recognize are the re-made classics or the soundtracks from commercials during the playoffs. (Seriously, just an hour ago I heard Roberta Flack’s, “Killing Me Softly,” performed by some unknown-to-me teenager with a recording contract).  My father's collection of vinyls celebrated wanting to hold your hand and a bridge over troubled water.  Now my kids—not I—know who set fire to the rain and when to chant "ho – hey."  Where did the middle go?  It was here just a few minutes ago.  An age is passing.  

Getting older is puzzling. Who among us gets it right?  We, each of us, have never gotten older before.  Our one shot at it is our last shot at it.  I'm still getting over the realization that I'll never be signed to sing a duet with Josh Groban or harmonize with Zac Brown.  [Heck, gone are the days of just being able to cut my toenails without first sucking in my breath.]  This isn’t a tirade about wrinkles and gray hair—it is genuine question, “How does one age well?”

Ah, but therein is the golden center: Jesus alone knows how to grow old well.  He, in fact, skates figure-eights around our clumsy aging process.  We do it with ignorance, but Jesus ages with grace—“And He continued to grow and become strong, increasing in wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him” (Luke 2:40).  The expected push-back is this: Jesus barely reached His thirties, how could He know anything about growing old?  And so it comes—the part that blows my mind.   

Jesus didn’t know how to grow old gracefully because of His thirty trips around the sun; Jesus knows how to grow old gracefully because of He put the earth in motion around the sun in the first place.  Jesus is “Father of Eternities” (Isaiah 9:6), the Lord of Time.  He alone knows how to grow old because He alone became young.  He who always was became.  Jesus grew up and grew old on top of being eternal.  His growing older is one way He became existentially like us.  But the fact that He is perpetually “The Beginning” and simultaneously “The End” is yet another way that Jesus is essentially unlike us, above us, categorically before us and is, therefore, alone worthy of our worship.  O Come Let Us Adore Him, Christ the Lord.