When Jesus rose from the dead, splendor returned to the world. From the depths of death’s dark gloom, Jesus emerged triumphant and the light of new life shone out permeating the entire earth. God’s redemptive purpose to not abandon the earth to its decay, death and misery, but to restore, renew and indeed re-create it with greater glory than it possessed in its pristine state, though prophesied throughout the Old Testament, was enacted in and through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

In the last post I discussed the Jewish concept of “resurrection” as an expectation which was

bodily (entailing a return to the life of the physical body),

earthly (as opposed to other-worldly),

corporate (it happened to all the people of God),

simultaneous (all at one time), and

eschatological (as the transitional event between this age and the age to come in which all things would be restored).

In such, I began to assert the notion that the resurrection of Jesus was not simply a fantastic miraculous event, perhaps the best of all the miracles in Jesus’ career. Rather, the resurrection of Jesus, as understood in its Jewish context, marked the irruption of the life of the Age to Come into the present. This Age to Come, was heralded by the Hebrew prophets as a time when death would be no more (Isa. 25), when all areas of life would be renewed and restored, whether they be ecological, agricultural, physical, political, economic, relational, etc., and God’s people would forever rejoice with gladness (Isa. 35:10).  In short, the entire earth and all that is in it would be renewed and re-created. When Jesus was raised from the dead, this re-creation began. The restoration of all things had its inauguration. As Jesus stepped out of the tomb, the springtime of all creation started to blossom and the age-anticipated promises of God for life, righteousness and freedom began to find their fulfillment. This notion is termed inaugurated eschatology, meaning that eschatological realities of the age to come have been inaugurated, that is, they have begun, even now in the middle of the present age, while yet awaiting a future consummation of fullness (this is often discussed in terms of the Kingdom of God being both “already but not yet”).

To continue to demonstrate this idea of the resurrection of Jesus heralding the advent of God’s New Creation (i.e., inaugurated eschatology), I would like to quickly breeze through the Gospel of John – a whirlwind tour perhaps, and show how the notion of “new creation” is present in this work.

To begin with, the familiar opening words of John are “In the beginning…” What is strikingly obvious to us, would have been equally apparent to hearers/readers in the first century. John is intentionally mirroring the initial words of Genesis, the famed creation story. While this would not be conclusive in itself (but will be made much more clear as we proceed), why might John be intentionally beginning his Gospel with the first words of Genesis? He continues to speak of the incarnation in terms of “light shining in the darkness,” a further allusion to the first chapter of Genesis. Is it possible that John is setting us up for precisely what it sounds like – a second (new) creation story?

In John 5:24-25, Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and  believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and  does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life. Truly, truly, I say to you,  an hour is coming and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.”

Three points are of note.

1)    The person who believes has, that is, currently possesses eternal life. This phrase translated “eternal life” literally means “life of the age” and was used in Jewish writings from or before the time of the New Testament to mean the “life of the age to come” (Dan. 12:2; Pss. Sol. 3:12; 13:11; 14:10; 1 Enoch 37:4; 58:3). Furthermore, in the Synoptic Gospels, the terms “eternal life” and “Kingdom of God” are used interchangeably on a number of occurrences (Mk 9:43, 45, 47; 10:17-30; Mt. 19:23-29; Lk. 18:24-30). Thus, when we come to the Gospel of John and see that the term “Kingdom of God” only occurs twice, it seems very likely that the often used phrase “eternal life” (i.e., “life of the age”) is John’s preferred way of referring to the same reality the Synoptic Gospels prefer to call the “Kingdom of God.”[1] This life of the age to come, this experience of God’s Kingdom is available in the present as the possession of those who believe in Jesus.

2)    This possession of eternal life entails “passing out of death into life.” Here we see clear resurrection language, as will be confirmed in the following verses. This further clarifies the reception of the life of the age to come. There is a sense to which the believer in Jesus transfers from the present evil age into the Age to Come, while yet remaining in the present age. Jesus uses a verb of motion, “passing out of,” to describe the believer’s participation in eternal life. This militates against the pure internalized understanding of these verses, as if Jesus is speaking mostly of an internal, immaterial, “spiritual” change in the believer. Jesus does not view this change as internal, but as external. It is not a “change of heart,” but rather a change of location for the entire person. Their “inner being” does not move, but “the one who believes” in their entirety of personhood moves beyond the realm where death has sway and into the resurrection life of the age to come.

3)    Finally, if this wasn’t already clear, Jesus emphasizes that the time in which this happens is now. This is significant because the resurrection events that will soon happen to Jesus in the narrative cannot be construed solely as an isolated incident for Jesus. We are meant to understand the dynamic connection between what happens to Jesus and what is available to the believer. As Jesus rises from the dead in the life of the Age to Come, so likewise all believers are able to participate in that life in the present.

In John 11 Jesus makes a remarkable statement: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die.”

As Christians, we have heard this verse so often, I think it ceases to strike us as strange. Jesus claims to be the resurrection. But the resurrection is an event. How can a person be an event? Furthermore, how can a person be an event that properly belongs to the entire people of God at an eschatological transition between the Present Age and the Age to Come? It seems like Jesus is telling us that he is somehow God’s future in person. He is the personal presence of the life of the Age to Come. Here among us, in the midst of a world inundated with decay and death, the light of God’s New Creation is beginning to shine. It is walking among us in the person of God-himself made flesh.

However, is this New Creation life restricted to the person of Jesus, as in, he possesses the life of the Age to Come, but the rest of us need to wait until his return to experience it? Does this New Creation, resurrection life, Kingdom of God presence leave the earth when Jesus ascends to heaven? The previous passage addressed (John 5) expresses the contrary quite emphatically, but even in this verse, Jesus informs us of the participation of the believer in the same eschatological realities. Since “life” and “eternal life” are interchangeable in the Gospel of John[2],  and since “eternal life” means the “life of the Age to Come” (see above), it stands to reason that the phrase “resurrection and the life” is a hendiadys, in which the two words joined by “and” should be taken together as a single idea. If not, since “life” certainly means the “life of the Age to Come,” we should at least see “resurrection” as the event which initiates the “life”[3] In either case,”life” in verse 25 certainly means “resurrection life” and thus the occurrence of the same word in the next verse, the “everyone lives” in verse 26, would mean, “everyone who has the life of the kingdom of God.” This is further advanced by Jesus’ assertion that unless one eats of the bread of life they have no life in them (John 6:51), meaning they do not have the “life of the age to come.”[4] The one who believes is the one who truly lives, who shares the life of the resurrection that Jesus himself embodies in the present.

If we skip forward a bit, we come to Holy Week.

On the sixth day of the week (Friday), after flogging him, robing him in purple and crowing him with thorns, Pilate displays Jesus to the crowd with the words, “Behold the man!” (John 19:5). Note that in Genesis 1 (remember our previous discussion about John 1 quoting Genesis 1 – “in the beginning…”), on the sixth day of the week, God created the human beings, those who were meant to rule the earth. Now on the sixth day of this week, Jesus is displayed as the true human, as a mockery dressed in royal attire, yet refusing to retaliate to the false rulers, to those whose greed and violence had corrupted their humanity to the point of unrecognizability.

The power hungry inhuman forces of violence succeed in killing the one who truly embodied what it meant to be fully human. The rulers of this world put to death the world’s true Lord. After doing so, he was laid to rest in an empty tomb. It was here that Jesus spent the seventh day of the week. As God rested from his labors on the seventh day of the creation account, so too, Jesus spends the seventh day in a Sabbath rest – the utter stillness of death.

John 20 begins with the words, “on the first day of the week.” Is it possible that more is going on here than a mere temporal indicator? As we observed this Gospel starting by alluding to the Genesis 1 account of creation, saw how Jesus understood himself as embodying the life of the Age to Come and sharing it with those who believe in him, and walked through days six and seven of creation during the weekend proceeding the first Easter, are we meant to understand that the timing “on the first day of the week” signals something much bigger than we were expecting? As Jesus rises from the dead, we are beholding the advent of God’s New Creation life bursting forth from the tomb! The Jewish concept of resurrection and new creation seems sufficient in itself to indicate such, but there is more in text itself. In verse 15, John tells us that Mary, seeing the resurrected Lord, believed him to be a gardener. What an odd detail. Why would Mary mistakenly believe Jesus to be a gardener, unless they were actually in a garden? And does not being in a garden, yet again allude to the biblical creation account? As Jesus rises from the dead, he is the New Adam in a renewed Garden of Eden. Eden has been restored and humanity once again has been given access to this Paradise once Lost.

In verse nineteen, we are told that “it was evening on that day, the first day of the week.” Apparently we need reminding that this is not any day – it is the FIRST day of the week. John repeats himself in order to emphasize, however allusively, the full scope of what happened on that day. Though the doors were shut, Jesus comes and stands among them saying, “Peace be with you.” After showing them his hands and side, “He breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.” Just as God breathed the breath of life into an inert Adam and he became a living being, so now Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit into his disciples at the dawn of God’s New Creation. Yet this new life of the Kingdom of God, is not merely for the disciples’ enjoyment. He charges them, “as the Father has sent Me, I also send you.” As the Father sent Jesus to be the living presence of the life of the Age to Come, so now as the followers of Jesus share in that life by believing in him, they are commissioned likewise to be agents of God’s Kingdom and resurrection life.

Though not in the Gospel of John, one more verse bears mentioning. In Luke 24:30, Jesus is sitting at a table with two disciples with whom he has walked from Jerusalem. When Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to them, Luke tells us that immediately “their eyes were opened and they recognized him.” Where else in Scripture do we have two people, who upon eating, have their eyes opened? Adam and Eve, after consuming the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, experience their eyes being opened into a shameful self-awareness of their nakedness. In Luke however, the resurrected Lord is reversing the curse of Adam’s sin. He is inaugurating the life of the Kingdom of God, the New Creation, whereupon partaking of blessed and broken bread (a clear allusion to the Church’s practice of the Lord’s Supper), eyes are opened from woeful disillusionment into a hope-filled recognition of the Risen Lord. After this experience, the two disciples immediately run out and announce the  Gospel: “Jesus is risen!” The experience of the life of the Age to Come, the initiation of overturning sin’s curse, in John’s Gospel results in being sent just as Jesus was sent, and in Luke results in the proclamation of the Resurrected Lord. The presence of God’s Kingdom is in our midst, inaugurated through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. This new life is the very impetus behind the Church’s mission in and for the world. Through proclaiming the Gospel of the Risen Lord and the arrival of God’s Kingdom, we become those who share and impart the life of the age to come amidst a world embroiled in the challenging yet, for those who believe, inevitably triumphant conflict with death.

[2] ibid.

[3] George R. Beasley-Murray, John (Dallas: Word, 1999), 190.

[4] ibid, 191.

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Though resurrection was the central message of the early Apostolic Church and a central theme through the New Testament, resurrection is of such minor note in the Old Testament it cannot even warrant being called a theme. It only is literally discussed in two passages. If resurrection is not even a theme in the Old Testament, let alone a major theme, how can we explain the phenomenon that resurrection became a (if not the) central theme in the New Testament? The easy and immediate answer is that a resurrection had in fact occurred, to one person in advance of all others, such that this this shocking occurrence became the determining characteristic of the burgeoning new movement. It was believed that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, far from being an isolated event, hailed the inauguration of the renewal of creation, the restoration of all things, which the prophets and sages of eras past had proclaimed.

In this series I would like to discuss the notion that the resurrection of Jesus inaugurated the eschatological reign of God, in which the powers of Sin and Death themselves are defeated and the entire creation is being renewed. Not simply being a confirmation of what happened at the cross, the resurrection was the beginning of a new age for planet earth. Through the resurrected Lord, a door has swung open through which the power of life over death has begun to permeate a world long pining under the slow torture of decay and the inevitability of death. The springtime of all creation has begun, after the long era of winter’s curse, causing life to be born anew and future hope to slowly emerge from beneath the shadows of despair. This life is not only future, but amazingly, mysteriously and dynamically present.

Before I get specifically to addressing how the New Testament shows the startling truth of Jesus’ resurrection inauguration of New Creation, I would like to describe the Jewish concept of resurrection. First as a word of clarity, “resurrection” does not simply mean to “life-after-death.” Resurrection was a specific kind of expectation which would involve the revivification of bodily life on earth. For a person to have an existence as a “spirit” was not what anyone meant when they spoke of “resurrection.”

It comes as a shock to many that not only does the Old Testament very rarely speak of resurrection, but much of it holds out little or no hope beyond the grave. Just a few passages will show this:

Psalm 115:17 – “The dead do not praise the LORD, nor do any that go down into silence.”

Isaiah 38:10-11, 18-19 – “I said: In the noontide of my days I must depart; I am consigned to the gates of Sheol for the rest of my years. I said, I shall not see the LORD in the land of the living; I shall look upon mortals no more among the inhabitants of the world. For Sheol cannot thank you, death cannot praise you; those who go down to the Pit cannot hope for your faithfulness. The living, the living, they thank you, as I do this day; fathers make known to children your faithfulness.”

2 Samuel 14:14 – “We must all die; we are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up.”

Ecclesiastes 9:5-6, 10 – “The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished; never again will they have any share in all that happens under the sun… Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.”

(cf. Job 17:13-16; Psalm 6:5; 30:9; 88:3-7, 10-12)

Other passages show the end of human life as returning to the dust:

Genesis 3:19 – “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Job 34:14-15 – “If he should take back his spirit to himself, and gather to himself his breath, all flesh would perish together, and all mortals return to dust.”

Psalm 90:3 – “You turn us back to dust, and say, ‘Turn back, you mortals.’”

(cf. Psalm 104:27-29; Ecc. 3:20)

Many, many passages use “sleep” as a way of describing death, meaning this state of inactivity, which forms part of the cycle of our lives, was the nearest approximation they could use to speak of death. The phrase “and he slept with his ancestors” to describe the death of a person is used dozens and dozens of times (cf. 1 Kings 2:10; 11:21; 22:50; 2 Kings 14:22; 16:20; 2 Chronicles 9:31; 12:16; etc.)

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After a lengthy google search, I managed to discover one Protestant church in the greater Kansas City area was having an Ascension Day service last Thursday. Overjoyed at finding my quarry, I happily drove the 20+ minutes to attend this service. Including myself and the other person who came with me, there were five people in attendance, including one person who arrived half way through. I guess this means that in Kansas City, approximately 4.5 Protestants celebrated Ascension Day this year. I wonder if this is an all time record low since the founding of Kansas City. Suffice to say, celebrating the Ascension of Jesus is not high on the priority list, let alone on the radar screen of the Protestant Church at large.

But why should it? The Ascension is one of those topics that seems to have slipped off the general theological grid in contemporary Christianity (nevermind the Presentation or Transfiguration). Both the ascension and session (“being seated at the right hand of the Father”) of Jesus are given prominent places in both the Apostles’ and Nicene Creed (indeed, considering what is NOT said in the creeds, being mentioned at all is a place of prominence). The early church apparently considered the Ascension to be a critical component of true Christian faith. However, perusing through one of the most popular evangelical systematic theology books in print at present, the Ascension is squashed into the end of the chapter on the resurrection. In fact, the topics of providence, miracles, angels, satan and demons, the di/trichotomy of human nature, election and reprobation and the intermediate state EACH receive more coverage than the resurrection and ascension combined, though the early church didn’t perceive any of those topics to be crucial enough to be included in the creeds.

I am gathering that Ascension Day has come to such a low place of recognition because in the average evangelical consciousness, the possible meaning for the ascension is rather opaque. Perhaps, if at all, it is endowed with a negative meaning - Jesus is no longer with us in person. We are alone to do what he told us to do until he finally comes back. I hope in the following to merely in outline, amend this theological lacuna, which turns out to be significantly more practical and pastoral than one at first might imagine.

1) The Ascension means Jesus is the world’s true Lord.

The grand prayer in Ephesians 1 culminates with the statement that after God raised Jesus from the dead, he “seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places,   far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.” To be in heaven is not to be “out-of-sight out-of-mind.” Rather, heaven in the Bible is thought of as the “control center” for the earth (cf. the parallelism in 2 Chr. 20:6; Job 38:33; Ps. 103:19). For Jesus to be seated in heaven, means that he is the world’s true lord and king over all.

2) The Ascension means heaven and earth are not as far apart as we might have thought.

It is funny how the way we think is often opposite to the way reality works. When we think of the ascension, we think of Jesus going away and not being with us. The exact opposite is expressed in Matthew 28. While this passage does not explicitly mention the ascension, it bears several features in common with the end of Luke and the beginning of Acts including Jesus taking his disciples to a mountain, teaching them and commissioning them to spread the gospel. It is not a stretch to think that they were the same event (though it technically doesn’t matter for what I am about to say). It is precisely here that he gives the promise, “I am with you always even to the end of the age.” How can Jesus ascend to heaven and be with us always? It is commonly assumed that this promise refers to the Holy Spirit. But what about the 10 days in between the ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit? Where those days exempted from “always.” The only way this can be true is if Jesus can be “in heaven” and with us at the same time. My sense is that this promise implies something that we as contemporary Christians often fail to grasp – that early Judaism conceived of heaven and earth, not as discrete locations a long way off from each other – but as two overlapping and interlocking dimensions of God’s created world. Think about this one the next time you are shouting at God “up in heaven.”

3) The Ascension means that the restoration of the full destiny of humanity and the entire earth is not as far off as we might have thought.

Hebrews 2 quotes Psalm 8 in saying “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, or mortals, that you care for them. You have made them a little lower than the angels; you have crowned them with glory and honor, subjecting all things under their feet.” The Psalmist’s awe at God’s consideration of humankind has less to do with “feeling good about yourself” as much as it does with the role and destiny God gave human beings of ruling the earth (cf. Gen. 1). It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if humans are ruling the world, they are doing a terrible job, but more so it seems like the world is completely out of the control of humans. Lots of people seem desirous to do things right, whether in personal, familial, local, national or global contexts, be we can never seem to get it right, and often make matters worse either by our incompetence or intention.

The author to the Hebrews agrees with this in quite an understatement – “As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to them (meaning humans).” He goes on to say, “but we do see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death so that by the grace of God, he might taste death for everyone.” How precisely is this an answer to the problem that God gave humans rulership over the earth, and as of yet it is completely out of control, full of death, decay and despair?  Because, Jesus as a human has been exalted to the heavens, he now sits in a place of rulership over the earth. Though we do not yet see the earth under the gracious rulership of humans intended by God, there is one human who has gone before the rest and is currently, as a token, fulfilling the destiny of the human race – Jesus the Messiah. The ascension of Jesus tells us that the restoration of humanity’s destiny — wherein our propensity towards destroying the creation would be healed and we exercise co-regency with God in establishing a gracious reign of justice, peace and life on earth — has begun in Jesus.

4) The Ascension means that we are to exercise this authority NOW

“But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—  and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus…” (Ephesians 2:3-6)

Apparently heaven and earth are not that far apart considering we can be in both places at once! I won’t try to explain exactly what I think this means now, but the immediate meaning is apparent – the authority that Jesus has at the right hand of the Father, we partake with him in the present. Jesus’ rule over the universe is something he already is sharing with those who are “in the Messiah.” The justice, peace, life and joy of the age to come is not something we are simply to wait for – it is something we have both the authority and responsibility to implement now. So much for the easy Christian life – we’ve got work to do!

Almighty God, who did raise your beloved Son from the dead and seated him at your right hand, so now restore your people from the mire of Death’s hold and the darkness of Sin’s night, that the light of his gracious rule might shine through our lives, growing brighter and brighter until the fullness of day, through Jesus the Messiah our Lord…

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This is from a series paintings depicting the entire passion/resurrection cycle on the walls of medieval church in Oxfordshire, UK. This scene is Jesus appearing to Mary.

Since I teach New Testament Greek, I am often asked why one should invest the time to learn a whole language just to study the Bible. It is commonly phrased as, “do actually need to learn that to understand the Bible?” Of course, the answer is no. The modern English translations are reliable enough to not lead you into heresy and to give you understand of the Bible’s main points. So then, why study Greek (or Hebrew for that matter)? Rather than give a drawn out philosophical argumentation, laying out all the benefits of learning Greek, I’ve decided to give an apologetic that goes right to the text. This will be the beginning of a series of (hopefully short) posts which will look at specific texts and explain why its helpful, illuminating and/or exhilarating to know whats “going on under the hood.” The point will not be that “these are the six passages where Greek is helpful, therefore you might consider learning it.” Rather, this is just a sampling of what will happen nearly every time you read the NT in Greek – you see things in fresh ways and from fresh angles, very often in a manner that is at once exciting and heart-warming

To start, I’d like to take a quick look at the first resurrection appearance in Matthew (apropos, since we are in Easter Season). The women arrived at the tomb, only to find it empty, with an angel sitting on the stone that had once concealed its interior. Instructing them that Jesus had risen from the dead (just as he said), and that they were to go report the news to the disciples, they ran off quickly in fear and great joy. Suddenly, Jesus “meets them” and says to them…according to the NRSV, “Greetings!” according to the KJV, “Hail!” and the NASB simply says, “he greeted them” without telling us what he said. However, in Greek, Jesus literally says “Rejoice!” Granted, this was a common greeting in first century Judea (ironically, earlier in Matthew, Judas greets Jesus with the same words as he betrays him), however, I just love that the first words out of Jesus’ mouth to another person after the resurrection are about gladness.  I can only picture Jesus saying this with a huge smile on his face. What he or the women should be happy about is not specified in the text. While, there were undoubtedly many things to be happy about (see my previous post on the resurrection and the renewal of the earth), I think Jesus was, amongst other things, simply happy to see them. After the agony of the preceeding weekend, Jesus’ heart was thrilled with delight to see his friends and for them to see that he was well (and indeed, far more than well…).

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I’ve decided to write a prayer for each of my “New Creation…Starting Now” posts. We’ll see how it goes…

Creator God, who is ever faithful to finish the work he started: so now continue through us the great harvest of new creation and expand through us the renewed humanity of reconciliation, that we might share with you in the joining of heaven and earth; by Him who is the first fruits of the resurrection and the firstborn from the dead, Jesus the Messiah our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

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In my last post, I quoted a line from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, an English poet who lived between the years of 1844 and 1889. The poem is so magnificent, I felt compelled to reproduce “God’s Grandeur” in its entirety. If some of the lines seem a little dense, try this commentary for assistance.

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

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When Jesus burst out of the tomb, what happened? What does it mean for us?

This past month, believers of all kinds, in their own ways, celebrated the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. The question I’d like to ask today, is what exactly happened when Jesus came out of the tomb alive? By saying this, I don’t even mostly mean what happened to Jesus himself, because as the Biblical authors attest, whatever happened, had reverberations that made the world a different place.

In 1 Corinthians 15:20, Paul tells us that, “the Messiah has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.” In other places, Jesus is called  “the firstborn from among the dead” (Col. 1:18; Rev. 1:5; cf. Rom. 8:29, Rev. 3:14). “First fruits” is an agricultural image, depicting the initial produce of a larger, single harvest. “Firstborn” is a family image, concerning the first child born, the eldest sibling of a larger, single family.

We learn at least two things from the images Paul uses here.
1) Whatever happened to Jesus, it was the first time it had happened. This clues us in that Jesus was not simply resuscitated. His body did not simply come back to life, in the same way that had Lazarus (John 11) and Jairus’s daughter (Mark 5), amongst others. Jesus resurrection was the beginning of something that had never happened before.
2) Whatever happened to Jesus, it is understood as a part of a larger whole, the first fruits of the entire harvest; the firstborn of the entire family. Something began in the event of Jesus’ resurrection that had broader implications than simply Jesus himself.

What is this larger whole that has been set into motion by Jesus resurrection? In Jewish thought, which forms the background and foundation for the entire New Testament, the resurrection was thought to occur 1) at one time, 2) to everyone at once, and 3) at the “capital-e” End. It was a single, all-inclusive event at the beginning of God’s ultimate future for the world, at the transition between this age and the age to come. This is how Isaiah describes it:

Isa. 25:6    On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
(7) And he will destroy on this mountain
the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
the sheet that is spread over all nations;
he will swallow up death forever.
(8) Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces,
and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,
for the LORD has spoken.

Feasting, food, and wine in abundance. Death, disgrace and tears annihilated. Resurrection takes place in context to a full scale restoration of humanity in their community with God and each other and the future of life on the earth. Resurrection happens as God unleashes the final stages of his plan to undo the effects of the fall and restore the earth. The apostle John puts it this way:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. (2) And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. (3) And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. (4) He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (5) And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”

Resurrection, seen in this way, is like the title page for a entire book, whose content is the restoration of all things, the complete transformation of life on the earth, the renewal of life the way God meant for it to be: a life full of joy, love and peace, with no mourning, crying, pain or death. God’s “making all things new” is the harvest of which Jesus is the first fruits. Humanity renewed and restored in right relationship with God, each other, and the entire creation is the family to whom the resurrected Lord is the “firstborn.” When Jesus rose from the dead, the harvest began. When the Son of God was restored from the darkness of death, the new family was forged.   When God breathed immortality into the broken body of the Messiah, the new creation was inaugurated, like a seed planted in the ground, whose hidden life slowly but surely emerges in all its grandeur. The resurrection of Jesus does not simply mean that Jesus is alive.  For the entire creation, mired by death and decay, to the eyes of many suffused with a hopeless gloom, even yet “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things (Gerard Manley Hopkins).” The burgeoning spring-time of creation has come at last. God’s new creation has begun – and we are a part of it. The life of the new creation flows within our veins. The implications of this is at once expansive and exhilarating, and to this I will turn in the near future.

** The Title for this post is graciously lifted from the title of a chapter in Simply Christian by Tom Wright.

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• Resurrection and New Creation (Part 2) – Whirlwind Tour of the Gospel of John (2)
• Resurrection and New Creation (Part 1) – The Jewish Concept of Resurrection (5)
• Heaven is Important…But it’s not the End of the World (0)
• The Spirit of the Resurrection Part 2: Gnosticism and Schizoid Spirituality (3)
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In the last entry, I discussed the “theology of glory” and the “theology of the cross” and my difficulty with both. I also mentioned how I feel that the problem is essentially Christological. How do we relate the cross and the resurrection in the person of Jesus himself?

In verse thirty of Luke 24, the resurrected Jesus sits down with two disciples who as of yet had not recognized that it was Him, who had not received the hope of resurrection that prevails over their present despondency. Luke is well aware here of the continued significance of the breaking of bread in Christian liturgy. It is at this point more than any other that every believer finds entrance into this story. Even if in our own disillusionment we grow accustomed and anesthetized to our own pain, disappointment and despair, we know that when Jesus breaks the bread, that we are the ones on the receiving end.

At the table, the resurrected Jesus enacts the same symbolic actions of the Last Supper and therein reveals himself as the crucified one. The resurrected one shows reveals himself as the crucified one. The crucifixion is not something Jesus has left behind forever in the triumph of life. The Christianity of the resurrected Lord is ever and always faith and trust in the crucified resurrected Lord. Resurrection in and of itself implies death, and for Jesus every-time his resurrection is mentioned, his crucifixion is implied. It is the symbolic reenactment of the crucifixion, which continues on in the liturgical life of the people of God, that the resurrected Lord is recognized and never apart from such is he known. Later on the resurrected Jesus would only be recognized by his disciples as he shows them his hands and feet (cf. Thomas in the Gospel of John). The contradiction of death remains present in every revelation of the resurrected Lord. He opens the eyes of others to himself in his own contradiction of death and life and herein frees us to live in the contradiction of death and life, promised hope and existing reality, that perpetually surrounds us. We do not live in the power of the resurrection by a denial of the deadliness of death, by the suppression of pain, by the avoidance of suffering or by the reframing of disastrous tragedies as an unmixed blessing.

“Through the knowledge of the resurrection of the crucified the contradiction that is always and everywhere perceptible in an unredeemed world, and the sorrow and suffering caused by that world, are taken up into the confidence of hope, while on the other hand hope’s confidence becomes earthly and universal. Any kind of docetic hope which leaves earthly conditions or corporeal existence to the mercy of their own contradictoriness and restricts itself to the Church, to the cultus or to believing inwardness, is therefore a denial of the cross. The hope that is born of the cross and the resurrection transforms the negative, contradictory and torturing aspects of the world into terms of ‘not yet’, and does not suffer them to end in ‘nothing’.” Jurgen Moltmann,  Theology of Hope

Thus, the “theology of the cross” and the “theology of glory” become an eschatological dialectic of “already but not yet.” In the present we recognize the presence of suffering, sin and death, as that for which Christ died and rose to defeat and destroy. We do not glorify them as redemptive. The redemption of God is against and away from the realities that mark the present age of sin and death. We suffer under these woeful elements, groaning for the liberation of the earth and partnering with God to bring forth and implement, in the power of the Spirit, that suffusing dawn of the new age that Christ has accomplished and sent bursting forth in his resurrection. The “theology of the cross” and the “theology of glory” cannot look at each other in bewilderment from across a sharp divide. One side cannot berate the other for being overly optimistic and enthusiastic, from which they cannot in turn rise insensitively “from glory to glory” wondering why the rest don’t “get it together.” The cross and the resurrection, though inherently contradictory, with one annihilating the other, must be held together in the life of faith. We must honestly reckon with the painful absence of God in the earth as humanity pines in suffering, while also holding to the hope of new creation declared in the resurrection. From that place we can then move forward with both sensitivity and courage, with tender and valiant hearts proclaiming, embodying and expanding God’s kingdom of freedom, righteousness, justice and life on the earth.

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• Will You Forget Me Forever? (1)
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• Do not Weep for Me… (0)
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