Time&Eternity

No Concept of Time without Narrated Time 31
When hymns from the second half of the twentieth century speak of the
future, then they generally do not distinguish between an earthly and a
heavenly future. The heavenly future is not only seen side by side with
earthly time, but God’s future is envisioned as also already being realized in
the present. Jonas Jonson writes that, in God’s Spirit, heaven is present on
earth. According to this hymn, one does not even need the anticipatory
power of the sacrament in order to make the future of God perceivable by
means of one’s senses:
Himmel på jorden, här får vi leva, .l.l.
Öva er barn, att leva i Anden,
våga idag smaka Guds framtid! 116
Apart from this, Jonson praises the Lord’s Supper as precisely the place
where, in the shared sacramental meal, one celebrates an anticipated taste of
the future:
.l.l. Vi reser ett tecken, rättvisans tecken, måltid delad med alla.
Vi smakar den framtid de fattiga hoppas, tid då murar skall falla. 117
In a third hymn by the same author, the Eucharist again appears as a
sign of the future in the face of threatened hope:
Kring detta bord församlas mänskligheten,
med hoppet vänt mot honom som skall komma.
Ett hotat hopp, som längtan håller uppe.
En enda värld.
I detta bröd är tecknet för vår framtid.
Det delas ut och räcker åt oss alla.l.l.l.
På detta bord möts himmelen och jorden.l.l.l.
Befriat folk kan föregripa freden.
En enda värld. 118
Quite often, older hymns base their trust in the future on the experience
of God’s faithfulness in the past. 119 In more recent hymns, the direction of
one’s thought is less from the perspective of the past into the future than
from the more or less distant future of God (back) toward our immediately
imminent future. The following lines provide an example of such thinking:
Vertraut den neuen Wegen,
auf die uns Gott gesandt!
Er selbst kommt uns entgegen.
Die Zukunft ist sein Land.
Wer aufbricht, der kann hoffen