In the Wallace collection in London hangs one of Nicolas Poussin’s great paintings, A Dance to the Music of Time. As the winged and grey-bearded Father Time plays a lyre the allegorical figures of the Seasons of life, Poverty, Labour, Wealth and Pleasure, dance an eternal round to his music. It was a painting that provided an inspiration and title for Anthony Powell’s sequence of 12 novels. Nick Jenkins, the central character of the novels, reflects on Poussin’s painting: “The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.”

Now, as we move from 2008 to 2009, there is a consciousness of the passing of time, of past, present and future, and perhaps a listening for what the music of time might be. Poussin’s painting was commissioned in the 1640s by Giulio Rospigliosi, who became Pope Clement IX. In the painting the inexorable sequence to which human life is seemingly captive is not all that is to be said. Above the dancing figures Poussin portrays another dance as Apollo’s chariot makes its way across the sky. As a recent interpreter has pointed out, this transcendent other dance is pointing to the possibility that our lives can have a “danced order” that participates in the very nature of God’s life and action.

What that divine life and action might be the Christian Church celebrates in the music of time that is the Christian year. That year begins with Advent, a time of overlap, which looks towards the End-time, the gathering up of all things at the Last Day with its theme of ultimate Judgement, our searching examining by the Love for which we were made, and no less points again to the nature of that love which came down to us at Christmas. In the birth of Jesus Christ God’s almighty and life-giving Word leapt down from heaven, an outpouring of love to catch us up into the divine dance of love. The trajectory of that love comes down to the lowest part of our need in the identification with our sinfulness and our death as the arms of God’s love are pinned in the gesture of embrace to the harsh wood of the cross. And from the blotting out of that love and grace in the death of Christ, the life of the new creation is born in the grave, in the exploding reality of that life at Easter in resurrection and ascension, and the outpouring of that new life in Pentecostal fire to kindle the flame of that new life in our hearts. For Christians that amazing divine dance, that generous self-giving of God in Jesus Christ is the music of time, and is the danced order in which we are called to share.

As part of that Christian year, at the new year’s beginning, the Church celebrates on January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany — in Russia and parts of the East, Christmas Day, in the West the revelation of God in Christ to the non-Jewish world. The story of the magi, the wise men, the astrologers from the east, has been elaborated and imaginatively meditated upon, by artists and through Christian devotion. They became kings coming coming with a great retinue to present gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the Christ Child on the lap of his mother, Mary, but originally these were symbolic gifts in which the infant Jesus was recognised as the Second Adam, the one whose coming brought into being God’s new creation. That new creation is for all the world, it is, in the true sense of the word “catholic”, open to all.

What is revealed is the God of unconditional love. Jesus, the one who reveals him, is the way, the truth and the life, but it is part of that amazing grace that Jesus opens up for us the treasures of other religions, and the treasures of all Creatures who long for unconditional love — to receive it and to give it. That is the dance to the music of time, because it is the dance of divine and eternal love.

The Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe