Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright (pretty close to my favorite, if not my favorite, theologian/author) says that Easter and Christ’s resurrection are more than just “power over the grave.” He portends that in a “back from the future” sort of way, the risen Christ is our “here and now” link to the Kingdom of God.I’ve just finished reading his newest (I think) book, Christians at the Cross, in actuality a compilation of eight Holy Week sermons he gave a year ago at a parish in Easington Colliery on the north coast of England. My reading sort of plodded along for a time as I took in the very short book (only 79 pages) – until the last chapter. Then, for me, it exploded with a powerful elucidation of what the Kingdom of God can mean for us.
Rather than me trying to interpret his writing, I’m going to just quote a few key paragraphs:
“When God made this lovely world, he wasn’t making junk. He doesn’t want to throw it away and do something completely different, as though the idea of space, time and matter was a bad one from the start. No: he wants to abolish, from within this world, everything that corrupts and defaces and distorts his beautiful creation, so that he can give the world a giant make over. New heavens and new earth – like the present one only with everything that’s true and beautiful and lovely made even better, and everything that’s bad and sad and degrading abolished forever. That’s what we’re promised. Read Isaiah 65 again and see.
“…When Jesus was raised from the dead on the first Easter day, it wasn’t simply as though he’d gone on ahead of us… In Jesus’ resurrection a bit of God’s future, of God’s new heaven and earth, has come forward in time… The point of the resurrection is that at Easter a bit of the future – God’s promised future – has come forwards to meet us, ‘back to the present’.
“…In his death, Jesus had taken all the sin and death and shame and sorrow of the world upon himself, so that by letting it do its worst to him he had destroyed its power, which means that now there is nothing to stop the new creation coming into being. Jesus' resurrection body is the first bit of the new creation, the sign of the new world that is to come.
“…And that is why Easter is the start of the church’s mission. Let's be quite clear. The church’s mission isn’t about telling more and more people that if they accept Jesus they will go to heaven. That is true, of course, as far as it goes (though we ought to be telling them about the new heavens and new earth rather than just ‘heaven’), but it’s not the point of our mission. The point is that if God’s new creation has already begun, those of us who have been wakened up in the middle of the night are put to work to make more bits of new creation happen within the world as it still is... (We need to) start to pray for vision and wisdom to know where God can and will make new creation happen in our lives, in our hearts, in our homes and not least in our communities. That’s what ‘regeneration’ is all about. (See my preceding post for a confirming view from the Lutheran perspective.)
Wright concludes, “What we do know is that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, that God’s new creation has begun, and that we have to do two things: first, to be true to our own baptismal vows to die with him and to share his new life, and, second, to allow his Spirit to work through us to make new creation happen in his world.”
I’ve never heard the Christian mission better stated.
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