Charles Brammall
As an adolescent, we always had New Year’s Eve with dear friends at their home perched high like an eyrie on the edge of a Lane Cove cliff. It proffered a panoramic vista of picturesque (and yes- picaresque: I was the picaro!) Chatswood Golf Course.
Chatswood Links had rich green fairways, huge lush trees, and sparkling lakes. The celebration always exhilarated me, because as a subset of having to kiss everyone as the clock struck midnight (yuk!), I got to kiss our friends’ daughter, Anne K. Anne was an older lass had been sweet on for years.
But on the last night of December, we dress sadness up as noise do we not? Fireworks, countdowns, flutes of something sparkling. Yet the mood always bears that slight curiously funereal feel. We are burying a year that refused to behave, and we are not entirely convinced the next one will be any better.
The melancholy is ancient. Ecclesiastes had it pegged long before party poppers were invented: “What has been will be again… there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecc 1:9). New Year’s Eve is the annual rehearsal of that line, performed loudly so we do not have to hear it.
The Mayfly knows this weariness in its bones (invertebrate as it is). In many of its species, the adult lives for less than a day. Hours, sometimes minutes. It emerges, mates, lays eggs, and dies. (Like the Aussie Wombat: “Eats Roots and Leaves” – yes, punctuation or its absence is crucial). The adult May has no mouth. No capacity to feed. No stomach. It’s just all urgency- hurry, hurry, hurry- no future.
The English name comes from a cruel accuracy. May (the month). Fly. Gone. It is the most honest creature at the New Year’s party, because it does not pretend that midnight changes anything. The clock strikes twelve, and the mayfly remains what it was at eleven fifty-nine: terminal.
This is New Year’s Eve sadness. The pathos is not that time passes, but that time passes without redemption. We know, if we are honest, that the fireworks do not forgive us. They illuminate the same regrets we had in October (even the gorgeous rain-falling-esqe one from the deck of the Coat Hanger). The same failures. The same relational messes. The same habits that have outlived our best intentions. Midnight offers a reset button that is not connected to the machine.
A man I knew, a successful barrister, spent New Year’s Eve 1997 sitting alone in his car outside his parents’ house, engine running, radio on low, unable to face going in. He told me later that as the countdown reached zero, Pink Floyd’s line floated uninvited into his head: “And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.” He said it felt less like poetry and more like an indictment. Fireworks popped. He wept. Nothing magical happened at twelve. He went home and slept.
So we wake on New Year’s Day and perform the liturgy of resolutions. Eat less. Stop smoking. Be a nicer person. Pray more. Scroll less. Drink water. Read Dostoyevsky, Hardy, or White. Jog.
The tone is admirable but a tad tragic. Resolutions assume that the problem is CAN be resolved. That if I grip the steering wheel harder, the car will become a different vehicle. By the third week of January, the gym car parks are empty again, and the soul knows what the body has already worked out. Willpower is a thin reed on which to hang a new life.
The soundtrack of this recognition is already written. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” sang Pete and Rog. “I can’t get no satisfaction,” groaned Mick with cheerful despair. Even Bono’s yearning “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” sounds less like rebellion and more like honest anthropology. We are restless, said Augustine, and our restlessness does not respect calendar boundaries.
The Christian Michael Polanyi, chemist turned philosopher, named what we feel but cannot quite prove. “We know more than we can tell.” We know, tacitly, that something is wrong with the New Year myth. We cannot quite articulate it at the party, but our bodies already know. Our hangovers are philosophical.
The Greeks were franker. Heraclitus insisted that everything flows, but even he knew that flux alone does not save. Aristotle could describe virtue with surgical precision, yet he could not conjure the power to make vicious people virtuous. Seneca tried. Marcus Aurelius journalled heroically. None of them rose from the dead.
This is where Christianity does something profoundly odd. It does not begin its account of renewal with resolve, but with resurrection. Not self-improvement. Not moral optimisation. Not a refreshed diary. A dead man getting up.
The New Testament does not say, “Behold, I make all things better organised.” It says, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation” (2 Cor 5:17). Not a New Year. A new world. And the difference matters. New Year’s resolutions rearrange the furniture in a house that is already collapsing. Resurrection builds a house, with award-winning foundations, where there was only rubble.
Notice how Easter, not January, is the Christian calendar’s true hinge. The early Christians did not gather annually to mark the passage of time. They gathered weekly to announce an interruption in time. “Christ has died. Christ is risen.” That is not a metaphor for optimism. It is a claim about reality. Something has happened that cannot be undone, and because it cannot be undone, it can undo us. In the best possible way.
A Hobartian lady once told me her story. New Year’s Day, 2004. She had woken with the familiar ache of regret, a marriage already disintegrating, a glass of champagne still sweating on the bedside table. She wandered into a small church because it was quiet and she wanted silence. The reading was from Luke: “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen” (Luke 24:5–6). She said it felt intrusive, almost rude.
But it lodged. “If that’s true,” she said, “then my worst night isn’t the end of the story.” Her marriage was saved. Not because of willpower. But because hope turned up, uninvited.
That is why Christian hope does not sound like a pep talk. It sounds like news. Good news (lit. “Gospel”). And world changing news like that has a peculiar power. It does not ask you to summon strength you do not have. It announces a strength that has already arrived.
Luther knew this, blunt as ever: “The law says, ‘Do this,’ and it is never done. Grace says, ‘Believe this,’ and everything is already done.” Calvin, less lyrical but no less firm, called the resurrection “the principal article of our faith” because without it, forgiveness would be a rumour, and ethics a burden.
The sadness of New Year’s Eve comes from the suspicion that history is a treadmill (viz. our Zen friends and family). Same sins. Same griefs. Same headlines. But Jesus’ coming back to life from the dead says history is not a circle but an arrow, and it has a destination.
More than that, it proves that the destination has already broken into the present, Acts 17:31- “God has set a day when He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man He has appointed. He has proven this to everyone by raising Him from the dead.”
New life is not a future prize for the morally tidy. It is a gift for the dead.
That is why the Bible dares to put resurrection language where it does not belong, at least by common sense. “You were dead in your trespasses,” writes Paul, “but God made you alive with Christ” (Eph 2:1 and 5). Past tense. Done and dusted. Accomplished. Foolproof, rock solid, iron-clad, water-tight. Applied.
Resolutions fail because they rely on memory. Resurrection works because it creates amnesia of a holy sort. “I will remember their sins no more” (Jer 31:34). God’s forgetting is the engine of our future. If God has decided not to remember, then the year ahead is not shackled to the year behind. And that is not mere sentiment. It is thinking God’s thoughts after Him.
A retired electrician in western Sydney, newly widowed, told me he dreaded New Year’s Eve because it reminded him that time was taking more than it gave (most importantly, his beloved wife). So one New Year’s Eve, he stayed home, Bible open, radio off. He read Paul’s stubborn sentence: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile… but in fact Christ has been raised from the dead” (1 Cor 15:17, 20).
He said the word “fact” did the work. Not feeling. Not mood. Fact. “I still missed her,” he said. “But I wasn’t trapped with her absence.”
For all its poignancy, our little Mayfly buddy also carries a quieter miracle. The adult’s life is brief because its real life has already been lived underwater, unseen, as a nymph. Months, sometimes years, hidden in the riverbed. The flight is short because the foundation was long. It was on rock, not sand. The ending looks abrupt only if you did not know the beginning.
Christianity makes an even bolder claim. It says your real life is now hidden with Christ in God (Col 3:3). What appears as a flicker is tethered to eternity. That death, the great mayfly-maker, has been de-fanged. Jesus’ resurrection is not the extension of our brief adult flight. It is the revelation that the riverbed was always there, and that the river itself will one day be renewed:
Rev 22:1-2: “… the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the city’s main street. The tree of life was on each side of the river, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree are for healing the nations.”
So perhaps this year, skip the grand resolutions. Keep habits, yes. Practice wisdom. Drink the water. Call Dad, who you’ve estranged yourself from. Forgive someone something small and then someone harder. But do not ask January to do what only Easter can.
New Year’s Eve will always be a little sad, because time alone cannot save us. Even the Eagles knew that much: “You can’t go back, and you can’t stand still.” But New Year’s Day can be quietly luminous, because resurrection has already happened.
And when the fireworks fade, think again about our fly-ish friend, dancing briefly above the water, incandescent and fragile. Its life looks painfully small until you realise it belongs to a much larger story than the moment suggests. So do you.
Because the last word over your year is not midnight, not regret, not resolve, not even death. It is an empty tomb, and a voice that insists, against all seasonal evidence, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev 21:5).
Main Image Credit: Peter Gill / UK / Wikimedia
Mayfly Credit: Abdulmominbd / Wikimedia
Brilliant!
Enjoy a blessed 2026 in Christ!