Time Doesn’t Heal, But God’s Time Does
A Johannine Vision for Religious Trauma Healing, Part 3
This is part three of a series on healing religious trauma. ICYMI, I encourage you to start with part one, Speaking the Unspeakable, and part two, “The Empty Grave, a Sea of Tears.”
I recently shared a bit of my story of religious trauma with a new acquaintance. As I told him about one episode of spiritual abuse, I referred to it as the most recent my family endured. Then I realized a few moments later that that episode was the second of three such experiences, so not the most recent. I laughed and he smiled knowingly when I said, “Man, trauma messes with our memory.” In many ways, trauma is a time illness.
As hard as it is for survivors to talk and feel (see links to parts one and two above), the last component Diane Langberg gives us might be the hardest: time. Whereas survivors have agency with talking and tears (indeed, exercising agency is largely the point), no one can control time. “And I can tell you two things for sure about time,” Langberg writes: “1) there is nothing we can do to make it go faster, and 2) when we are in pain, that is exactly what we want it to do!”1
I’m going to take Langberg’s emphasis on time as a diving board for some deeper exploration in John. What might the Pastoral Gospel have to say about time and healing? It sounds like a strange question, but time is a central feature of John’s narration. As trauma and time are inherently related, it strikes me as more than coincidence that John addresses both. I recommend reading and/or listening to this while seated and wearing a life vest; the waves can get pretty choppy as we sail further out into the bottomless ocean of John.
Past, Present, Future, and Eternity
First, here are just a few observations about the centrality of time in John. There are many, many more, as evidenced by the fact that Douglas Estes could write a 326 page book titled The Temporal Mechanics of the Fourth Gospel: A Theory of Hermeneutical Relativity in the Gospel of John.
John begins with time: “In the beginning” (en archē, 1:1), the same opening phrase of the Greek text of Genesis. The Gospel also ends with a reference to time in Jesus’ second coming (21:21-23).
John uses time as a central thread from the beginning to the end of Jesus’ ministry. This is “the hour” which John and Jesus repeatedly mention (eg 2:4; 7:30; 8:20; 13:1; 17:1; 19:14).
John also has a temporal structure with the use of the Jewish feasts. It is owing to John’s mention of three Passovers that we talk about Jesus’ three-year ministry (first Passover, 2:13; second, 6:4; third, 11:55; 12:1; 13:1; 19:14). Furthermore, the narrative time slows down for one year in ch. 5-10 as John describes Jesus’ movement and dialogues through the course of the annual festivals of Passover (Spring), Tabernacles (Fall), and Dedication (Winter).
All of these resemble linear time that we’re familiar with: beginning, middle, and end; past, present, and future. It’s more complicated than that, however. As Craig Koester puts it, “Time changed, for the author of John’s Gospel, when the word of God became flesh.”2 The life that God offers through the missions of Son and Spirit is not just “life,” but “eternal life.” Or, as Mary Coloe prefers to translate it, “eternity life”: life that is not only unending but “an entirely different quality of life—the life God lives in eternity.” This repeated language of “eternal” (aiōnios, 17x, 24% of NT uses) fits with John’s emphasis on time.
Eternity: God’s Time
Because “eternal life” can be a cliché phrase (mostly thanks to the popularity of John’s Gospel), I think it’s worth slowing down and listening to a few theologians. This may seem a distraction from the practical emphasis for trauma healing, but I’m trying to follow John’s lead into these deeper waters. Here’s how Kevin Vanhoozer describes eternity:
“God’s eternity is the form of his own life and hence the medium of his own being in communicative act. As such, eternity is not timelessness but ‘eminent’ (Barth) or ‘supra-’ (Balthasar) temporality. Time is not the contradiction but as it were the finite analogy of eternity. God’s life is ‘temporal’ in the sense that it is in communicative motion. Unlike created time, however, God’s time does not pass away. To affirm God’s lifetime as eternal is to affirm the fullness and aliveness of God’s triune being. And this is the key point: God’s time—eternity—is one not of immobility but of ceaseless (communicative) activity.”3
It is impossible to try and understand this without quickly bumping against the bounds of our finite minds. As David Ford observes, John’s use of time compels us to stretch our imagination:
“John is shaping an analogical imagination…that, within an unlimited horizon of God and all creation, not only stretches backwards, forwards, inwards, and upwards, but confounds and transcends the directionality of time and (through mutual indwelling) the common sense of literal space. It is a way of teaching the mind and imagination to abide in abundance, found through participation in the eternal life and love of the Father and the Son, and lived out in the ongoing drama of discipleship in the Spirit.”4
One way to see this “transcending of the directionality of time” is to read slowly through the upper room discourse of John 14-17 and pay attention to the constant temporal references and the switching of verb tenses. Commenting on this section, Shelly Rambo writes, “Past, present, and future mix throughout in unusual ways, presenting us with a different temporality.”5 For example, right from the very start of John 14, Jesus says “If I go away and prepare a place for you, I come again [present tense] and will take [future tense] you to myself, so that where I am [present tense] you may be [present tense] also” (14:3). The remainder of the upper room discourse is marked by this fluidity of time. See especially John 16:16-33 where Jesus and the disciples discuss the “little while” of Jesus’ absence, “in that day” (v. 23), “until now” (v. 24), “a time is coming” (v. 25), “on that day” (v. 26), “now” (vv. 29-31), “an hour is coming, and has come” (v. 32).
That clause in 16:32 is perplexing. How can an hour be both present (is coming) and past (has come)? The first answer to that is, quite simply, Jesus. The second answer is trauma, as seen from the context of 16:32: “Indeed, an hour is coming, and has come, when each of you will be scattered to his own home.” This “scattering” and the confusion of time is less confusing when read through the lens of trauma.
Trauma and Temporal Disintegration
How are time and trauma are related? Psychologists use phrases like “temporal disintegration” to describe the damage trauma causes to one’s sense of time. Here is one summary statement:
“Trauma alters the temporal sequence of past, present, and future, thus leaving the psyche in a time-shifted dimension, where the shadow of the past extends over the present, and the unbearable present hinders growth and development [into the future].”6
Trauma fractures time. This is much worse than T.S. Eliot’s lament in Four Quartets that “time and the bell have buried the day.” “In fact,” writes Shelly Rambo, “in trauma, distortions in time constitute the wound.”7 Survivors’ sense of time is at once frozen and fluid: living fluidly between both present and past, while frozen in the past and unable to imagine the future. Eliot describes this later in Four Quartets: “Time the destroyer is time preserver,” and thus, “You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure, / That time is no healer.”8
Could it be that John’s unique use of time offers healing to survivors? They exist in and out of time, but that is just what John teaches is available in the eternity life of Father, Son, and Spirit. An a-termporal existence, lived not from trauma but from eternity.
These reflections on time are obviously more theological than our exploration of talking and tears. But I think there is a practical payoff. Just like the survivors of the Johannine community, time has been taken away from spiritual abuse survivors. The Johannine community suffered from the time wound that is trauma, and they also had time taken away in their loss of liturgical time in the Jewish festivals. So, what John does is give time back. Not with a time machine or a time-turner, but with God’s time—time transfigured in the eternity life of the incarnate Son and the sent Spirit.
“This is Eternal Life”
How might we follow John’s example of giving back time to survivors? If the very definition of “eternal life” is “that they may know you, the only true God, and the one you have sent — Jesus Christ” (17:3), what might that look like in practical terms? Here are just a few suggestions.
John grounds the good news of Jesus in the eternal life of the Trinity, in “God’s time,” as Vanhoozer puts it. The hope and healing provided by Father, Son and Spirit is not bound by time, and yet it is always present within time.
Helpers and advocates can be messengers of that “supra-temporal” hope by holding on to it ourselves. We are messengers of eternal life when we maintain our own secure connections with past, present, and future supported by that life.
John gives time as the medium for dialogue with God and others (16:4, 25, 26). In Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship, a deep theological tome that references John almost 2x more than any other book of the Bible, Vanhoozer explains that time is “the form or medium of interpersonal (relational) existence…Time opens up the possibility of interacting with others, of saying or doing things in response to someone or something else. Not the sheer passing of days but dialogue - the action of speaking back and forth; communicatively processing - is the key to a theological understanding of time.”9
In this sense of time, we can give a positive spin to Jesus’ reply to his brothers in John 7:6, “your time is always at hand.” That is, the time for God’s children to communicate with him is “always at hand.” That possibility always exists, even and especially when the possibility of interpersonal relationship with other humans has been ruptured by religious oppression.
John gives time in the very development of his Gospel. It was the latest of the Gospels, one of the latest books of the NT, and yet it was composed over decades, with multiple revisions prompted by communal traumas.10 The healing and transformation to which this Gospel testifies is also the work of a lifetime.
We can give survivors honor by understanding and supporting the same slowness of the healing journey.
John shows awareness of the ways in which sacred time is fractured by trauma. Each of the liturgical feasts—Sabbath, Passover, Tabernacles, and Dedication—are associated with the trauma of religious persecution.
We too, in caring for survivors, must be sensitive to the loss of sacred time. We avoid assuming that Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter are sources of joy and comfort. They might be, but they are likely also sources of grief and pain.
John demonstrates how Jesus subverts the normal course and meaning of time. Thirty-eight years of disability (John 5:5), and even a lifetime of blindness (John 9:1), are no match for Jesus’ eternal power. In the death of Lazarus, delay becomes good and glorious (John 11). In the temple cleansing and triumphal entry, which were only clear after Jesus was raised, John shows that the past is not fixed in stone (John 2, 12). Past events, even the darkness of trauma, can take on new meaning in the light of Jesus’ resurrected life.
We can likewise hold out that hope for survivors. We might not say it to them that directly (ie, counseling is not preaching), but the long, slow process of healing requires that healers have a sense of time shaped by the Gospel message. Belief in the eternity life Jesus gives helps us have patience, compassion, and understanding when survivors struggle with impatience, angst, and confusion.
John, with his unique use of characters and characterization, gives comparatively more time in single narratives to marginalized, oppressed, and hurting characters: the woman of Samaria (ch. 4), the man born blind (ch. 9), and Martha (ch. 11). While some characters reappear for various lengths of time (Nicodemus, Thomas, the BD, Judas), none are as honored and centered with prolonged narrative roles as those two women and one man.
We follow John’s lead when we give people ample time, especially trauma survivors. We don’t rush them when they repeat things and tell a story they’ve told countless times. We listen patiently, in the way that John must have listened to the healed blind man tell his story of religious abuse and institutional betrayal. That was surely a tale told across many meetings over a table of wine and bread.
Togetherness
Which brings us to a conclusion. Langberg highlights the need for talking, tears, and time, but she doesn’t stop there. She describes three more elements in the second phase of trauma recovery: loving relationship, work or purpose, and faith. We could spend even more time connecting those to John’s Gospel, but I want to end with the return to loving relationships.11
Returning to relationship starts with just one person, one listener, one sister or brother willing to pay the cost of tears and time. In the words of John, it starts when we incarnate the love of God as Jesus did, in flesh, in word and deed (1 John 3:18).
We incarnate Jesus’ love when we not only speak, but listen, for the first words of the Word of God came in a question: “What are you looking for?” (1:38).
We incarnate Jesus’ love when we bear witness to tears, as Jesus did with Mary Magdalene, and even shed tears himself with Martha and Mary.
And we incarnate Jesus’s love when we point survivors to the one who transcends and transfigures the time that has been fractured by their trauma.
Quote from Thomas Torrance
‘I am the truth?’ The speaking of these words was reported as a historical happening, but He who spoke them and still speaks them is the eternal Son of God. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.’ This Truth is both eternal and historical, Truth who is not timeless, for He so participates in time-relations and assumes time into Himself that time is an inalienable element in His nature as Incarnate Truth…He is the Eternal become historical and is historical only as He remains the Eternal. He is really historical because in Him time is redeemed of its decaying and illusory tendencies and made fully and permanently real, resisting corruption and vanity. Therefore this Truth remains and continues as real historical happening throughout history, which, just because it is real, moves against the stream of all that decays and crumbles away into the dust of the past, or vanishes into unreality. He is not dead, but living Truth…known according to its two-fold nature as eternal and historical, as the movement of the eternal in time, a movement that takes our time seriously, and has for ever taken it up, sanctified and healed, into union with itself.12
Question
What time is it for you? Do you feel the slippage of time warped by religious trauma? If so, maybe it’s time to talk with someone. You can send me a confidential message or schedule a free telephone consultation at https://aaronjhann.com.
Langberg, Suffering, 152.
Craig Koester, The Word of Life: A Theology of John’s Gospel (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008), 182.
Kevin Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 254.
David Ford, “Reading Backwards, Reading Forwards, and Abiding: Reading John in the Spirit Now,” Journal of Theological Interpretation 11.1 (2017), 81.
Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 100.
Mezzalira, S., Santoro, G., Bochicchio, V. et al, “Trauma and the Disruption of Temporal Experience: A Psychoanalytical and Phenomological Perspective,” Am J Psychoanal 83, 36–55 (2023).
Rambo, Spirit and Trauma, 19.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Orlando: Harcourt Books, 1971).
Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology, 321-322, emphasis original.
See Martinus de Boer, John 1-6: A Critical and Exegetical Commentary (New York: T&T Clark, 2025), 188-193, who argues for four versions of John over the course of more than thirty years: an initial “Signs Gospel,” prior to 70 CE, with three revisions prompted by three traumatic crises: “expulsion from the synagogue (or prospect thereof),” between 70-85 CE; “execution (or prospect thereof),” between 85-100 CE; and “schism within the Johannine Community” around 100-110 CE (p. 110).
See Langberg, Suffering, 153-154.
Thomas Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 152.