The Christian Year refers to the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Ordinary Time. These seasons enable the Church to mark time—and thus be shaped in her worship, identity, and mission—by the life of Jesus. They seek to root Christians in a different timeline and re-sync us with God.

When God created the world, he made it to progress in rhythms and cycles. He created the course of the sun to give us each day, the phases of the moon for each month, and the rhythm of the seasons for each year. The Lord commanded Israel to celebrate the weekly feast of Sabbath as a sign of their unique covenant relationship with him (Gen 2; Ex 20; Dt 5).

Not only did God order time in creation to give us boundaries in which to live, he also instructed his people to reorder their time as a community by his mighty acts of salvation. God gave the Israelites instructions for sacrifices and offerings as well as feasts, fasts, and festivals (Ex 23; Lev 23; Deut 16). These events were given to draw each generation of the people of God into the grand story about God’s redeeming love for Israel and the world.

Since the coming of Christ and the kingdom of God, the Church has reordered her time to tell the story of this new work in our world. Christianity is centered not on abstract ideals or teachings but on a historical person who became man, lived, died, and rose again, and therefore made an irreversible dent on our calendar and the way we mark time. Like the Jewish festivals, the seasons of the Church help us celebrate God’s mighty acts of salvation as they culminate in Jesus and his redemption for the world.

By following the life of Jesus in the liturgical calendar—the anticipation of his coming in Advent, his incarnation in Christmas, his ministry in Epiphany, his suffering and death in Lent, his resurrection in Easter, and the life of the Church through the Spirit in Ordinary Time—the Church transforms time into the very means of encountering and experiencing God’s saving work. One might say that the Christian year is the first catechism of the Church to celebrate and teach the truths of the gospel. Through each season we grow in our knowledge and experience of the words and deeds of Jesus and what it means to follow him.

Reordering our time by the Church calendar causes us to experience time and our own little stories in terms of God’s grand drama of redemption. These rhythms form us into people who live in the present for the sake of our neighbours, with deep roots in God’s mighty acts in the past, and an orientation to the future that is full of hope.