The resurrection of Jesus means that Jesus was right. What Mark had been saying several times before (This is my beloved son; Mark 1:11, 9:7), is demonstrated as God raises Jesus to life (Acts 2:32). If Jesus was right, and his ‘Way’ is the ‘Way’ God holds up and says, “Here it is. This is how it’s supposed to work,” then God’s people should look more like Jesus, and less like the Pharisees, Zealots, Essenes, and Herodians.
I think that this is actually a caution to us in the church. To say that Jesus was right is not to say that we’re right about Jesus. I think we have to keep asking whether what we say and what we do look more like Jesus, or more like something else?
Do we look like the Pharisees, loading people down with religious burdens and refusing kingdom entry to ‘certain’ people who want to come in? Do we look like the Zealots, fighting a holy war, letting the ends justify the means? Do we look like the Essenses, running away from the world into which we were sent to be a blessing, critiquing the ‘bad world’ from a safe and ‘righteous’ distance? Do we look like the Herodians, enjoying the benefits of privilege through compromise and complacency?
The world changed and nobody noticed. To believe in the resurrection of Jesus is to believe that a cosmic shift has occurred. God’s promised work of healing the rift between heaven and earth began in the raising of Jesus.
Death, Paul says in 1 Corinthians, is the last enemy to be conquered.
1 Corinthians 15:24-26
“Then the end will come [Gk., eita to telos, “the goal will be reached”], when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. 25For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” The universe became a different place when death, for one, was overcome. It was the taste of things to come, but it means that “things to come” have already come. God’s future, parts of it, are already in our past. The promises that God is going to bring healing and restoration to all creation, have already begun to happen.
The resurrection of Jesus means that our future hope is to share in the resurrection.What happened to Jesus will happen for those who belong to Jesus. I don’t know if this challenges your ideas about the future, but for me, it is a whole different way of thinking about the big long Future. It is about heaven and earth coming back together, not people leaving earth for heaven.
1 Corinthians 15:20-23
Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. 22For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. 23But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him.The language of ‘firstfruits’ says that Jesus was the first to experience something that everyone who belongs to him will also experience. This is not “going to heaven when you die.” That very well will happen, but it will happen along the way to resurrection. Heaven and earth were created to be together. Human beings were created as dust filled with God-breath: heaven enlivening earth. What happened for Jesus will happen for those who belong to Jesus.
The resurrection of Jesus means that there will be a kind of resurrection for the whole creation. What happened to Jesus will happen for all of creation.
Romans 8:19-24
The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24For in this hope we were saved.Think about the Easter story and how it fits with the creation story. On the sixth day of the week, there is Jesus, the representative of humanity, the Second Adam, obeying God, trusting God, suffering the death, tasting full the curse. There is Pilate proclaiming, “Ecce Homo” (Behold, the man). And there on the seventh day, Jesus rests in the tomb, having completed his work. But then there is something new: an eighth day—or is it a New First Day? The first day of the new creation. Is this maybe what the Gospel writers were trying to say all along? That we are in the middle of God’s new work of New Creation—begun in Jesus, and being carried out by the Spirit who was there (in Acts 2 and in communities of Jesus’ apprentices ever since) hovering over, not waters, but people?
What if in God’s work of new creation, the reversal of the results of the curse involves the perpetrators in the work of repairing the shattered creation?
Of course, we shouldn’t kid ourselves and think that we can or will fix it. Ultimately, the healing (resurrection?) of creation is something only God can accomplish. But I think we are supposed to anticipate that future in how we order and conduct our lives.
The resurrection prevents us from mindless destruction and abuse of the creation (e.g., it’s all going to burn up anyway, so who cares what we do with it?), and from the unrealistic ideas of progressive triumphalism (where things just get better and better until we’ve made heaven on earth). Resurrection—of Jesus, of people, and of creation—is the work of the Creator. We cannot bring it about. But it is the future God will bring—is bringing, and has brought—and (and here’s the cool part) we are invited to get and give a taste of it here and now.
That is the bittersweet beauty of Jesus’ resurrection. It is beautiful because of what it has begun—because of what will happen. Heaven and earth will be reunited. Life and love will win over fear and death. We will find a kind of existence beyond our ability to imagine.
It is bittersweet because it is here only in glimpses. Glimpses of beauty in a sea of chaos, tragedy, violence, suffering, and destruction.
To be a resurrection community is to be a people of hope: A people who do not run away from the bitter seas of human suffering, but who bring attention to the glimpses of God’s beautiful future, and who, where they can, embody those glimpses of God’s future in their patience, in their joy, in their generosity, in their forgiving, in their gentleness, in their mercy, and in their love.
