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Resurrection Last time I was up here I talked about Creation. - talked about what made the Hebrew story unique when compared to other religions of the day. - talked about how they understood reality based on the creation narrative. (God is creator and sustainer, the physical creation is good, etc.) We need to hold into this. Throughout millennia and history, exile and homecoming, wars and times of peace, famine and bounty…Israel never let go of this. To do so would have meant they were trying to create and live in a different story, one other than God’s. - we need to understand this. Changing any of these things fundamentally changes the story into something that might sound similar, might have remnant of the original story…but is NOT the Story we find in the Scriptures. The nation of Israel believed God was working toward something. For them to clearly define what that was proved difficult (was like seeing something out of the corner of your eye, but it disappears when you look at it directly). So they used images: - thorns and thistles being overtaken by myrtle. - lions and lambs lying down together. - no more sea (water/ocean represented chaos/darkness) They knew it would be a time when Israel’s enemies would be defeated, when they would inhabit the land God intended for them and when God would inhabit it with them. There would be no more schism between Israel and God, between humanity and God, and they would once again walk together in the cool of the day. Peace and harmony with God’s creation, with each other, and with God. The ancient Rabbis had a term for this: olam haba. “Life in the world to come.” Life in this restored creation and humanity. - in gospels, when people ask Jesus about how they can acquire/achieve “eternal life”…this is what they are asking: “How do I inherit olam haba?” Life in the world to come. Basically: How do I become the type of person who will feel at home when God restores all things? Some referred to this incredible reality-to-come as the Age to Come. Israel’s ideas and understanding about this Age to Come developed over the centuries: They had been promised that through the line of David, God would send them a King. One who would be ‘like a son of man’…but not reign like any earthly king. He would reign like God, as God would reign, as His representative. He would be God-with-us. Or in Hebrew: Emmanu’el. - The Age to Come would be defined by this King’s reign…and so people also began to speak of it as the Reign of God or the Kingdom of God—the place/time where God’s desire and intention is done. So Israel waited and hoped. This king, this Chosen One (messiah), would be their rescuer, one who would save them, redeem them…and most importantly restore them. - And in that word (restore) we see the dreams and anticipation of an entire nation. The nation of Israel was plunged into exile for nearly 600 years (Babylon…Assyria…Persia…Greece…Rome) Throughout all of this the nation became scattered and broken. A mere whisper of its former self. The 12 tribes of the nation were dispersed and disorganized. Lineages were confused and mumbled. And the entire time, what they desired…what they hoped and longed for, was restoration. To be put back together. For things to once again be made right. For the dislocation to be set back into joint. - Later, when Jesus would gather together 12 disciples to follow him, don’t think that symbolic act was at all lost on people—it represented the 12 tribes being brought back together, Israel restored. The Jewish people longed for restoration, and they knew they would finally experience it in the Age/World to Come, which would be ushered in by God’s King who would reign justly and righteously and mercifully over the world, setting things to right and healing what was broken. And they understood that this Age would be inaugurated and kicked off through a single event: RESURRECTION. The Jewish people (including Jesus and the writers of the NT), understood and divided time/history into two parts: This Present Age (Present Evil Age): includes everything that has happened up until this point and is happening now. The Age to Come: the time when the world is restored, disease and sickness and death is done away with, humans carefully and creatively tend creation, God once again dwells among His people, heaven and earth become one, etc. - and the way the Israelites would know that the World to Come had in fact come was through resurrection. When every person who had physically died was literally and physically raised up from the grave, only now with new and restored bodies, to once again inhabit and cultivate God’s restored creation. - Those who were still alive at its inception would experience a sort of change/transformation through which they would receive newly restored bodies, ones that could now live and exist in a world where death and disease were no longer part of the equation. This was the Jewish hope. This IS the Christian hope. Some things we need to understand about resurrection: 1. Resurrection was a tangible and physical event. It would take place here on this earth, within creation. - the term ‘resurrection’ was never used to refer to a person’s soul going somewhere or to speak of some sort of disembodied spiritual state. When someone like Paul talks about resurrection, he is not implying a person’s soul rising up to heaven—he is saying that those who were dead, literally in the ground and without life, will be raised up and be just as physically and tangibly present as we are right here, right now. - they won’t be ghosts or souls minus the body…they will be who there were, only now even more so. 2. Resurrection was not another term for ‘life after death.’ - the hope of the Jews and early Christians was not the guarantee that their souls would inhabit a spiritual realm called heaven for all eternity after they died. - death (and life after) was actually not something Jews really celebrated or viewed with much fondness. Any sort of ‘life after death’ state is rarely mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures: Job talks about it as a place of shadows, others simply refer to it as a place of sleep or rest. Actually, the Israelites LACK of expounding upon life after death actually made them unique among ancient cultures and religions (like Egypt and Assyria and Babylon, which all had overwhelming and intricate beliefs it). the reason they didn’t have much to say about it is because it wasn’t the main point, it wasn’t the hope they understood God’s Story to be telling. Their ultimate hope was not a spiritual ‘life after death’…the ultimate hope for the Jew and early Christian was ‘life after life after death.’ Resurrection. And it was this belief that set them apart from every major philosophy, religion, and every faith that they ever came into contact with. In fact, some of the worst and most destructive heresies the early church ever had to combat were those that stated our hope was that our souls would be released from the prison of our physical bodies and go to exist in a disembodied spiritual somewhere. This line of thought is actually a very popular heresy called Gnosticism. - and it was in reaction to this that the early Christians said “No.” It was in response to this belief that John wrote his gospel and very purposefully begins the entire thing by saying the Word, this force that was with God and brought about all things and in essence was God, came into the world in flesh and blood and bone. Incarnation. Through the incarnation God was validating the goodness of his physical/tangible creation. Yes, it might be marred and in crisis because of sin, but God’s desire is to restore it, not dispose of it. - we see this throughout God’s entire Story: He calls Abraham to head up his ‘crisis response team’…bringing healing and blessing to all the world. Through Abraham this becomes the calling and mission of the entire nation of Israel. And all of this culminates and is fulfilled by Jesus, who does and becomes what Israel was supposed to be and do but could never accomplish. Jesus said, “I am the vine.” The national symbol for Israel was the vine—it was carved on the very doors of the temple. Jesus is saying to Israel: I am you. “I am who you were supposed to be. I am the embodiment of this entire nation. I have brought together the tribes, I have brought healing to the sick, welcomed the stranger and alien.” - He fulfilled the Law and the prophets. He was who Israel was supposed to be. In the Story of God, the Creator and Redeemer are the same (huge point). Nearly every ancient religion, in their stories, separates the Creator from the Redeemer. In their stories, the Creator, who created something that seems to have gone bad, is separated from the Redeemer, who redeems that which has gone bad. - Heresies of the early Church took the bait on this…and the result was a Christianity where salvation became something that, rather than a hope and rescue within this world, became a release out of this world. In these sideways versions of the Story, the point becomes rescue/escape FROM this world and entrance TO a completely different one that hasn’t ever been marred by sin or rebellion. - If we find ourselves trying to tell the Story in this way, we need to start back on page 1: “And God saw all that He had created, and it was very good.” The physical Creation is not intrinsically evil—it’s God’s beautiful handiwork that has been tarnished by the effects of sin and rebellion and evil. The Story of God, the story we find in the Bible, is the story of the Creator who delivers his own creation from the ravages of sin and restores it, remakes the new from within the wreckage of the old. Salvation and deliverance is for the sake of the world. And so the early Christians, in what they called the Apostle’s Creed (which referred to the things the apostle’s had taught, rather than what many were now teaching), spoke out and against this version of the story by saying: “We believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” They affirmed the creation and the beginnings of the world, and in doing so affirmed God’s vision for the world as He set it forth through creation. - they’re saying God had a purpose for creation when He created it, and He still does. He’s never abandoned or given up on that purpose. And human beings are called to live in continuity with God’s purposes. The hope we find set out in the Bible, especially in the writers of the NT, is not that God is helping us escape this world…but that heaven is flooding into it. Just like Jesus prayed: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, here on earth as it is in heaven.” Resurrection doesn’t make any sense if the point of the Story is to escape the world as some disembodied soul while our physical body still sits in the ground. Do we go to heaven when we die? Yes, the Biblical writers say that something of us goes to dwell in the presence and care of God when we die…what exactly this looks or feels like, the NT writers actually don’t spend much time talking about. The best understanding they had was that something of us does enter into a time of restfulness and refreshing in the presence of God. But by no means was this the end…or even the main point. Because at some point those souls would be given restored physical and tangible bodies to re-inhabit a restored creation. This is what they longed for. When writing to the Christians in Corinth, Paul writes: When the decaying puts on the undecaying, and the dying puts on the undying, then the saying that has been written will come true:
Death is swallowed up in victory! Death, where has your victory gone?
Death, where is your
sting? - Paul is quoting two passages (Isaiah 25 and Hosea 13) which pointed in the direction of God’s Story…of creation reaching its intended goal, of enemies being defeated (not just Egypt and Babylon…but sin and death), of God’s victory, the creator’s victory, over all the forces of chaos and greed and destruction. No more rebellion. No more death and darkness. No more sea.
If our spirit simply goes somewhere
to dwell and that’s the end of it…then death is never actually dealt with. God
doesn’t claim any sort of victory of death—its sting is just as potent and
permanent as the first time someone was affected by it.
These passages that Paul quotes are
saying that death has claimed a victory, and the pagan world responds by just
shrugging its shoulders and accepting it. But The Jewish world declares that
God remains the creator and will do a new thing. And then Christian message
goes on to say that he has actually already done the new thing in
the Messiah, Jesus…and that through the power of the Spirit, he will do
it for all of Jesus’ people as well. - if we live the story without holding on to the resurrection for what it really is, we end up shruggimng our shoulders at death. If something within us simply goes to inhabit some ‘bye and bye’ while our bodies slowly rot in the ground for all eternity, then God hasn’t achieved any sort of victory. If that’s how we understand things, if that’s the story we tell, then, to quote Paul, “We…among all people…are to be most pitied.” But if it’s true…if it’s true that Israel’s role was to be the people through whom God would rescue His creation; if it’s true that Jesus, as God’s Messiah, bore this role in himself; and if it’s true that in going to his death he took upon himself and somehow exhausted the full weight of the world’s evil…and then three days later (on the first day of the week—a VERY important detail) was resurrected and because of that, God has begun something new… …then there are some HUGE implications. Life. Changing. Implications. These implications are the things most of the NT writers spend most of their time trying to hash out. They understood that the Story of God had taken on a critical and fundamental change through Jesus and his resurrection. There’s one last thing we need to understand about resurrection: The Jews had always viewed the event of resurrection as something that would happen at the end of time (so to speak), and when it did, it would happen to everyone all at once. But it happened in the ‘middle’ of time…and only to one person: Jesus. A future hope became a present reality, but not in the way they were expecting.
This reality forced the early Jewish
Christians to undergo a MAJOR paradigm shift as they reworked their hopes and
expectations within the reality of what had just taken place through Jesus.
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