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The space agency NASA has started work this week on creating a time zone for the moon. Because there is less gravity, an atomic clock would tick at a different rate – faster – than a clock on earth. Lunar Standard Time may well be a thing by the end of 2026, the time NASA has been given to put together a moon-centric time system. Obviously, the earth’s time system is determined by the movement of the planet spinning on its axis, making a day about 24 hours; well in fact 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds. Although the rate at which the earth is spinning is slowing, meaning that in this century, a day is longer than it was in the past. When we’re asking fundamental questions such as how long is a day on earth, framing a time system for the moon feels like an existential task.

This week too, while NASA is pondering this conundrum, much of the Christian church is in the middle of the 8 days of Easter, a festival whose name simply means ‘dawn’ and whose date is itself determined by the phases of the moon. A festival that marks the spiritual fusion between time and eternity. The theological word used is resurrection: not resuscitation or restoration but resurrection. A thing all in itself, unlike anything before. A seismic revelation that eternity is true and here now, if there is even a now. And that this has always been the case, if you can ever even say ‘always’……

One of the defining characteristics of the resurrection that Christians celebrate is that the revelation that death isn’t the end of life doesn’t come in a policy statement or a communique to a population ready to hear it. It doesn’t come over a loud speaker piped into every home in some Orwellian re-definition of what it is to be human. It doesn’t come from a pulpit or a throne, or a media centre or the office of the president.

It comes from a woman – Mary Magdalene - ready to perform a religious ritual for the dead in a quiet early morning moment full of grief and tears. Full of confusion and blurry eyed recognition. A small moment that becomes big news. That brings to the ones who hear it, great energy and excitement and much more sacrifice than they thought possible.

Easter resurrection isn’t a happy ending to a sad story. It’s the disruptive dawn light that reveals what had always been there; life that’s eternal and love that’s immortal. A dawn that dismantles the horizon, that upends the limits of human imagination. Something unimaginable.

Something like human beings making new time on the moon.

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