PERSPECTIVES ON EASTER

+

This post is made up of excerpts from Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense by N.T. Wright (Harper Collins, 2006). 

HEAVEN AND EARTH: THE PUZZLE

There are three basic ways we can imagine God’s space and ours relating to one another.
I   Option One  Slide the two spaces together: God’s space and ours are basically the same -- they’re two ways of talking about the same thing. God is everywhere, and everywhere is God. “Pantheism,” Everything is divine. (Problem: it can’t cope with evil!)

II  Option Two  Hold the two spaces firmly apart. God’s space and ours are a long way from one another. The Gods are totally separate from us, and are not involved. God and heaven have nothing to do with us. (18th century “Deism.”)

III Option Three  (Classic Judaism and Christianity)
Heaven and earth are not the same thing, nor are they separated by a great gulf. Instead, they overlap and interlock in a number of different ways. C.f. in  Old Testament Jacob’s ladder connecting heaven and earth, Moses at the burning bush:”You are standing on holy ground” (= a place where heaven and earth intersect), the portable tent of meeting. The main focus of the overlap of heaven and earth was the temple in Jerusalem. 
    A sense that God can be present on earth without having to leave heaven lies at the heart of Jewish and early Christian theology.

What happens when the God of Option Three decides to deal with evil?  God decides to set things right by the renewal of the entire cosmos, of heaven and earth together. But the new creation will come about only through one final and shocking exile and restoration. 

THE RESCUE OPERATION

The themes of kings and temple, of Torah and new creation, of justice, spirituality, relationship and beauty come rushing together in the dark theme that lies at the heart of the book of Isaiah. The king turns into a servant, the Servant of the Lord,, and the servant must act out the fate of Israel, must be Israel on behalf of the Israel that can no longer be obedient to its vocation. The lifeboat goes out to the rescue, and the captain gets drowned in the process.

This theme, developed out of the royal picture developed in Isaiah 11 but with the strange new twist of a vocation to obedient suffering, is laid out, step by step, in Isaiah 42, 49, 50, and 52-53. This, it appears, is how God’s rescue operation must take place.

All of these themes come together and take flesh in Jesus Christ. We’ve recently relived the mystery of his passion, death and resurrection. All of us have personally experienced suffering in its many forms, so I’m not going to dwell on that part of God’s rescue operation. Rather, I’d like to look more closely at the mystery of Christ's resurrection from the dead. 

REFLECTING ON THE EASTER MYSTERY

The resurrection of Jesus is the central mystery of our faith. As a mystery, it can never be fully understood, but we can come to an ever deeper understanding of that mystery and what it means for us. Here are eight interrelated points for our consideration.

First, resurrection is not resuscitation. Christ did not “come back to life,” as if backing out of the tomb (think of Lazarus, the widow’s son, Jairus’ daughter, all of whom were brought back to life and died and eventually died again. He rose from the dead, “glorious and immortal.”

Second, there were no witnesses to the event of the resurrection. The real action begins when the risen Jesus begins to reappear, not as a battered, bleeding survivor, not as a ghost (the gospel stories are very clear about that), but as a living, bodily human being. It is these appearances that are the turning point for the first Christians.

Third, the risen Lord’s appearance, “the same but different” posed a crucial challenge.     Christ began appearing to his disciples, showing himself to be the same Jesus (the nail wounds, he could speak and eat), but his body was somehow different (he could pass through closed doors, his best friends didn’t recognize him). The gospel writers and the early church had to struggle to find a way to talk about the paradox of Jesus’ being “the same but different.” They had no vocabulary for this. Nothing in their Jewish literature or imagination had prepared them for a portrait like this. His body seems to have been transformed in a way for which there was neither precedent nor prophecy, and of which there remains no second example. 

Fourth, to believe these things about the risen Lord requires that we exchange a worldview which says that such things cannot happen, for a worldview  in which, embracing the notion of a creator God making himself known initially in the traditions of Israel and then fully and finally in Jesus, says that Jesus’ resurrection makes perfect sense when seen from that point of view.

“Faith can’t be forced, but unfaith can be challenged.”

Fifth,  Easter and “life after death.” In the face of our secular

world’s denials that there is any life at all beyond the grave, many Christians have seized upon Jesus’ resurrection as the sign that there really is “life after death.” This tends to confuse things. Resurrection isn’t a fancy way of saying “going to heaven when you die.” It is not about “life after death” as such. Rather, it’s a way of talking about being bodily alive again after a period of being bodily dead. Resurrection is a second-stage postmortem life: “life after ‘life after death.’” (115)

None of the resurrection stories speaks of the event as proving that some kind of afterlife exists. They all say instead: “If Jesus has been raised, that means that God’s new world, God’s kingdom has indeed arrived; and that means we have a job to do. The world must hear what the God of Israel, the Creator God, has achieved through his messiah.

Sixth, Easter doesn’t make any sense from the “second option” point of view, in which God is completely separate and distant from the world; that’s why we don’t think of Easter as “the greatest miracle.” We need to view Easter withing the classic Jewish worldview (option three above). Remember that in this view, heaven and earth are neither the same thing, nor a long way removed from one another, but they overlap and interlock mysteriously in a number of ways; and the God who made both heaven and earth is at work from within the world as well as from without. Sharing the pain of the world -- indeed, taking its full weight upon his own shoulders. 

Seventh, Easter leaves us with a task. From that point of view,

when Jesus rose again God’s whole new creation emerged from the tomb, introducing a world full of new potential and possibility. Indeed, precisely because part of the new possibility is for human beings themselves to be revived and renewed, the resurrection of Jesus doesn’t leave us passive, helpless spectators. We find ourselves lifted up, set on our feet, given new breath in our lungs, and commissioned to go and make new creation happen in the world.

Israel’s vocation was to be the people through whom the one God would rescue hs beloved creation.
Jesus believed himself, as God’s messiah, to be bearing Israel’s vocation in himself.
In going to his death he took upon himself, and in some sense exhausted, the full weight of the world’s evil.

If these three statements are true, then clearly there is a task waiting to be done. “The music he wrote must now be performed. The early disciples saw this , and got on with it.”

Eighth, when Jesus emerged from the tomb, justice, spirituality, relationship, and beauty rose with him. Something has happened in and through Jesus as a result of which the world is a different place, a place where heaven and earth have been joined forever. God’s future has arrived in the present. Instead of mere echoes, we hear the voice itself: a voice which speaks of rescue from evil and death, and hence of a new creation.