Nietzsche in his short work On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life describes his own studies in the Greek classics as “untimely” and giving him “untimely experiences,” and he also names the book in which that work was published Untimely Meditations. The study of the classics is untimely insofar as it is “acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.” I find this altogether fascinating. He thinks that his untimely education is producing in him untimely meditations for his present time and making him an untimely person. He thinks that by writing he is counter to his own time, reshaping his own time, and benefiting a time to come. I will hijack this term for the following meditation, acknowledging that what I say is an oversimplification and only a tangent off of Nietzsche’s meaning.
An underlying notion of untimeliness is that we are the children of our time, and that some oddballs by various influences become the estranged children of other times. I feel as though I have met a few people, here and there, whom I would call “untimely” in this sense, either because of their education or their upbringing or unusual experiences. They are like the children of a different time, good or bad, and will always stand out in that way to me. But as I considered this untimeliness more, I began to meditate on a song by Jason Upton called “Dear John,” which takes the tone of Jesus speaking or writing to John the Baptist about their lives. The following is the third verse:
Do you remember how it made us feel
To be traded for a foolish lie?
I was the song that danced
You were the song that healed
But neither song could satisfy
Wisdom was fighting for her life
We were the children of our time
Commenting on this song, Upton repeated the last line saying, “We were the children of our time, and they killed us, John!” As at Luke 7.33f., no matter what extreme form the gospel takes—whether coming from John the ascetic wild-man, or Jesus, who eats and drinks and talks with sinners—it will not be appealing to the world and those who live by its principles. Jesus and John preached the same message through two radically different lifestyles, and both were rejected. The excuse for this rejection was on the basis for their lifestyles, but in truth it was the message, which was altogether untimely in the sense mentioned above. Why they did not fit had to do with where they came from and who sent them, not what they looked like or where they lived. This kind of untimeliness is all about the internal, and nothing to do with what the world looks at on the outside.
When Upton says of John and Jesus that they were the children of their time, this should be colored by the first verse of the song:
Do you remember when our mothers met?
Mama told me that they laughed
Was that a sign for us?
Or a sign for them?
When unborn babies testify
Carried between the earth and sky
Sons of eternity in time
He calls John and Jesus “sons of eternity.” This is where my meditation led me: they were indeed the children of their time, and all who are a children of this time are, for all times, untimely.
This is now a far cry away from what Nietzsche was claiming about his own work, and I don’t mean to make too much of a comparison. I only offer some questions evolving from the language that I have stolen:
- Are all followers of Jesus, those who take upon themselves the name of the sons and daughters of the living God, called to be untimely as he was?
- How does such untimeliness come about regardless of lifestyle, regardless of asceticism or (comparative) sybaritism, regardless of the outward appearance?
- What should the untimely meditation look like which comes about from studies in eternity?
