What would you do with one day more?

A leap year creates opportunities.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

Looking straight down on someone sitting in an armchair working on a laptop. They are surrounded by clock numerals and hands on the floor.

Kevin Ku on Unsplash.

We're all going into extra time. If you've found yourself thinking, 'If only I had some more time', then this is the year for you. Congratulations. So how are you going to make the most of the extra day we're gifted? In a leap year, the 29th February square sits quietly there on the calendar, with little fanfare, unless you're one of the unfortunate souls to be celebrating your quadrennial birthday. But it's not just another Thursday. It's redemption time if you've ever flown east across the international date line and wondered where that day disappeared, never to return.

When you think about extra time in football, the pressure is only heightened, the anticipation and trepidation palpable. Willy Wonka - no, not the recent foppish Timothée Chalamet, but Gene Wilder – famously got muddled when he feverishly announced, 'We have so much time, and so little to do!' Unlike Otis Redding, sittin' on the dock of the bay, wasting time, we have learnt to squeeze more and more into our days, making the most of the time.

I'm not immune. I've recently begun using an AI app for scheduling meetings and tasks. This app promises to turbocharge my productivity by 137 per cent. Somehow it boasts, 'There are now 13 months in a year'. Of course, there's little way of measuring just how super-duper-extra-productive this is going to make me but so far, I still seem to only have seven days in my week. So, if we were to stop spinning on our hamster wheels of productivity for a moment, and take a look at time (given with this extra day we have the time to do so), how might we make the most of it?

The essence of time must mean both its quality and its quantity.

It's worth measuring not only how much time we have, but the quality of the time we have. We know how to measure time, but how do we measure this measure? Time is of the essence. But what is the essence of time? For Charles Dickens, the best of times and the worst of times went hand-in-hand. The apostle Paul warned the church in Ephesus to make the most of every opportunity, 'because the days are evil'. Is time neutral? Perhaps we should ask the women and children of Afghanistan after the Doha agreement was signed on the last 29th February, with ominous consequences. Every day has the capacity for good and evil, including in a leap year. And if the days are evil, then as we consider how we live, as the King James Version puts it, that we can 'redeem the time'.

Then there's not only redeeming the time in terms of its quality, but also its quantity. Eventually, one day (quite some time away), HS2 will mean there's 32 minutes 'saved' for those travelling between Birmingham and London. And how many times have you said or heard recently that you've 'run out of time'? Our society treats time as a scarce commodity. There's regret over the time that we have wasted on an unworthy Netflix offering, on doom-scrolling, or that time in the post office queue we'll never get back.

I recently went to a memorial service of a friend who died in her early 60s. It was not only a sober reminder that we don't know how much time we have, but also an inspiration to live like someone who made the most of her days, by helping others to make the most of their time.

The essence of time must mean both its quality and its quantity. Richard Curtis' film About Time invites us into the relationship between a father and son who have the power to travel through time. While the lesson learnt is that we have the power to make the most of every day, the bulk of the film is really about the relationship. Any time he wants, the son can escape back to Cornwall and play table tennis or skim pebbles along the water with his dad. These experiences beyond his own linear timeline teach him how to live in his present reality.

Christianity also invites us to live in the love between a Father and a Son, and from that place we keep time. Jesus spoke about eternal life: not only a quantity of life beyond death, but a quality of life that we can experience beginning today. Sure, we can't escape the reality of any of the worst times around us, but we can invite the best of times of eternity into today. Maybe our relationship with time is so fraught because we were made to live beyond time.

The wristband on my watch recently fell apart. I suppose you could say I've been walking around without time on my hands. Time doesn't need to be elusive, slipping away from us. Time, just like the day, can be seized and grasped. King David wrote of God: 'my times are in your hands'. A leap year gives us a whole extra day of deadlines, potential ephemeral joys and sorrows. Perhaps putting our hope not in today, nor tomorrow, but into the hands of the maker of time is the greatest leap.

Article

Creed

Easter

Resurrection

18 April 2025

4 min read

Easter is almost too big for our human minds to grapple with

How can we 'go figure' the seemingly incomprehensible?

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Adrian Mag on Unsplash.

Forgive me for getting a bit ahead of myself, but I’d like to say something of the Resurrection. We’ve barely even started the Triduum and the Jesuit saying rings in my ears: “If we don’t die with him on Good Friday, we can’t rise with him on Easter morning.”

But part of the problem this epigram presents is that it’s not so much Good Friday that we skip over, but Easter morning. In our determination to focus on the Passion of the Christ, Easter can perhaps be a joyful sermon, a jolly good lunch, an exclamation that “He is risen!” and we move on.

So when it comes to miracles, too often it’s the Big One from which we avert our attention. And we can even skip the entire thing. I encountered two of my erstwhile Church primary-school children on a Holy Week dog walk. “Father George!” they cried. I’m afraid I spoke to them and their parents about clues for an Easter-egg hunt.

Like the size of the universe, Easter is almost too big for our human minds to grapple with. So we confine ourselves to reciting facts and beliefs. Our universe is 13 billion light years wide and came from literally nothing. Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and appeared to his disciples.

There is a real fear of the Resurrection among the faithful. Not in the way that scripture speaks of the fear of God, but a much more basic fear of the schoolchild that we’re not getting it right. It’s as if we’re meant to believe but can’t, with a dash of the awful dread that those who say that - rather like Donald Trump - it’s not to be taken literally but seriously might just be right.

It’s the fear of the yawning abyss between literal truth (in Greek, logos) and metaphorical or allegorical truth (mythos). And it’s as if we’re being forced to make a choice that, in conscience, we can’t. As such, it becomes what St Paul might call a stumbling block, something that gets in the way rather than illuminates. And it’s one we quietly ignore.

I think I want to say that we need to be liberated from the worry that there’s a right way to interpret it, or that there’s a binary choice to be made between literal and metaphorical truth. In the events of Easter morning, we’re being offered a both/and response rather than an either/or choice.

In this model, historicity is useful but insufficient. We know as a historical fact that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by the Roman authorities and we can very reasonably assume, in historical terms, that one of his disciples, a woman from Magdala called Mary, went to his tomb after the Jewish sabbath and found it empty.

Thereafter the experience of the Resurrection becomes harder, if not impossible, to describe. Not just for us, but especially for the first witnesses to it. That’s partly why this gospel scripture is written in a way that is unlike any other, more breathless, more personal, more anecdotal and more experiential. It’s as if the insurgent Jesus movement is seeing in colour for the first time.

If we’re looking for a miracle, incidentally, here it is. Whatever has happened, the utter defeat and dispersal of this small, provincial band of rebels in death and despair has been irreversibly transformed within three days. The two-word modern term for this phenomenon might be: Go figure.

But we should not avert our eyes from less convenient phenomena, evidence that is not just metaphorical or allegorical but which may be downright worldly and motivated by expedience. It isn’t controversial to observe that there is a difference between the empty-tomb narratives and the apparitions (as the Roman Catholic catechism calls them) of the risen Christ, the latter in part arising from competing factions for patriarchal authority the earliest formation of Church.

The empty tomb isn’t just evidence of the risen Christ. It’s there to show us symbolically where God is not. In John’s gospel, Mary sees cherubim sitting at the head and foot of the slab on which the body lay, echoing the mercy-seat of the ancient ark of the covenant, the empty throne of the invisible Jewish God, Yahweh. The Christ has “gone ahead” to continue the living work of God in his nascent Church of the new covenant.

Above all (and those two words can be read literally), this dualistic approach to the Resurrection calls its observers to relax about it, to let go of our understanding of it. The words and actions of the risen Christ often seem to confirm as much: "Don't hang on to me", "Shalom" (Peace be with you), "Come and eat", "Feed my lambs".

So, struggling to comprehend the Resurrection isn’t a deal-breaker. In a way, the divine message is that the biggest miracle of all is no big deal. Life really does go on.

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