The Resurrection of the Whole World

Imagine being one of the disciples who followed Jesus to Jerusalem.  You were close at hand during the catastrophe of his trial and execution.  Imagine your disillusionment at seeing the one you loved shamefully nailed to a cross.  For you, he exemplified everything that was good, true, and beautiful.  But for religion experts, government officials, and even ordinary people he was dispensable. 

Now imagine, after a few days, seeing Jesus alive again.  Imagine visiting the tomb only to find it empty.  Imagine your friends who for months sat with you at Jesus’ feet,  being just as disoriented as you were are by all of these events.  Imagine, as the days and weeks following Easter passed how many of your life principles were upended.  For Jesus to appear again after being disgraced on the cross would make at least 7 conclusions inescapable.

1. He is still amazing.  Always has been.  Obviously, your early enthusiasm about Jesus was not misplaced.   That burning hunch you had when you first met him and dropped everything to travel with him was the smartest moment of your life.  Along the way, you didn’t understand everything that Jesus wanted to share with you.  There was so much to take in and digest.  Maybe you’d been a little lazy in paying attention to everything Jesus taught.  Some of it lodged in your thoughts, much slipped away forgotten.  But now Jesus has returned and you realize that everything he did and said and tried to teach you was one coherent, glorious whole.  Your disciple companions have the same feelings.  As you talk about your shared experiences odd fragments pop into the collective memory.  The plot lines of Jesus’ parables comes back.  And the inscrutable centerpiece of Jesus’ teaching, the Kingdom of God, makes much more sense now that this jarring return from the grave incident has occurred.   In a sense, it isn’t simply Jesus’ body that has come back to life.  It is his whole ministry
2. The circle of friends around Jesus is back.  Not only has Jesus been raised, so has the movement that grew up around him.  The disciple company, also been brought back to life.  Easter brings the resurrection of the church.  And with the church alive again so is its mission, the early expansion of Christianity.
3. At last the bad guys lost.  Governmental power, backed by religion’s endorsement, had been topped.  In the ancient world when one kingdom defeated another kingdom, the beaten nation adopted their victor’s religion.  In Jesus’ time there were messianic movements, insurgent groups inspired by a charismatic leader.  The movement dissolved when the Roman Empire captured and killed the leader.  The partisans in the movement didn’t elevate another leader and fight on for their cause.  They assumed that their cause was wrong.  Because it had been defeated.  Jesus’ resurrection not only certified his own message, but decisively discredited the legitimacy of the religious-governmental alliance.
4. Resurrection now has a precedent.  The ancients had no shortage of ideas about what happened to a people after they died.  Israel believed that in the end God would eventually breathe life back into every one’s body in a general resurrection.  Obviously, Easter did not bring a general resurrection.  But the bodily restoration of one person resembled the Jewish end times hope.  What happened with Jesus and the empty tomb was unexpected.  But it most closely resembled Israel’s vision of a general resurrection than any other afterlife ideas that circulated in the ancient world.   People who believed that Jesus rose would naturally think that The Resurrection was under way.  A comparison helps: Humans landed on the moon a half century ago.  Because of that fact etched in history, it’s inevitable that somebody at some point will go back to the moon.  How and when it will happen are mysteries.  But the fact that it will happen is an unavoidable assumption.  The resurrection of Jesus, etched in history, gives similar confidence.
5. Jesus had reason to abandon his disciples as they had abandoned him.  This one may seem small.  When Jesus came back he came back to his disciples.  Unfortunately, the named disciples’ level of loyalty and courage was at low ebb by Easter morning.   One of them had monetized his relationship with Jesus by taking a bribe in exchange for making it easy for religion leaders to arrest him.  The disciple leader, Peter, disavowed knowing Jesus.  All of the disciples broke and ran away from Jesus as he was being arrested.  For Jesus to walk out of the tomb and make a beeline to reunite with the disciples was surely motivated by an unshakeable love that even the most egregious disloyalty could not dislodge.
6. Jesus didn’t fly away to heaven or some spiritual realm.  The fact that Jesus came back physically to the place and world that had killed him is important.  If Jesus was going to rise from the dead or be raised by the Father from the dead, why not do so in some spiritual or heavenly realm?   Why not do so along the lines of dubious Christian piety that sees death as the occasion to “fly away” to another wonderful place far away from the struggle of this life?  Jesus didn’t “fly away.”
7. The Resurrection of the Church. If all of the Gospel’s resurrection narratives are taken as a whole then they paint a picture of a 40 day reestablishment of Jesus’ earthly ministry.  After Easter, Jesus calls fishermen…again.  He teaches from the Bible…again.  He shares table fellowship…again.   The dominant movement of the events immediately preceding and following Easter are toward rather than away from the Earth.  Even the Ascension emphasizes the humanity of Jesus reigning over the world with a promise of return.  The Holy Spirit later descends.   There is a powerful this-worldliness about the closing episodes of the gospel stories.

The Disruptive Gift

I’ve listed seven implications of the resurrection of Jesus.  There are more.  One glorious one that isn’t in my list of seven is the fact that Jesus’ resurrection gives confidence that his followers will also be raised by God.  How does the Gospel According to John put it?  Because he lives, we shall also live.” (John 14.19)  Obviously, the prospect that we will follow Jesus in our own experience of resurrection brings a sea change to our personal outlook on life.  What fascinates me is that days or maybe years elapsed before someone had the thought: “You know, I do believe that being raised isn’t going to stop with Jesus.  Even I and my Christian companions just may be raised up by the grace of God.”  Some 20 years after the first Easter, Paul in the Corinthian letters reflects on the resurrection of those who have died.  It appears that the idea circulated among early Christians before Paul set his pen to paper.  But there is no evidence in the Gospel’s resurrection accounts, which represent early tradition, that the original witnesses of the empty tomb and appearance of the Risen Christ were thinking about their own destiny of resurrection. 

My point is that the adjustments in the world view of the first Christians were still being worked out years after Jesus had ascended.  I’ve often wondered if the adjustments or implications of Jesus’ rise from the dead are still coming to the surface.  

N.T. Wright likens Jesus’ resurrection to the imaginary situation where a benefactor donates magnificent piece of art to a college.  We imagine a huge painting that is too big to be hung on any of the existing walls in the campus buildings.  In order to accept the priceless gift, the college must build a new building to house the painting.  The new building in turn requires a general reorganization of the campus layout.   Maybe all of the construction on the college campus has an impact on the surrounding town.  The ripple effect may spread far beyond the the painting.

The Glorious Chain Reaction

Jesus’ rise from the dead, a concrete happening that played out in a particular time and place, is like the painting.  It forces change, especially for those who know or believe that it happened.  The Resurrection starts a glorious chain-reaction where one after another of one’s deep assumptions about how the world works are dislodged.    What began as disciple-befuddlement on Easter day became more and more glorious in the disciples’ esteem as each day passed.  As each new disciple finds his or her way into coming to grips with what happened to Jesus after he was laid in the tomb, the glorious incongruity starts freshly. 

That Just Happened

Another story from my college days helps to illustrate.  Back on campus during my sophomore year, I had a good friend who was a terrible student.  He failed his classes and couldn’t get written assignments turned in in a timely way.  Both my friend, his parents, and teachers were convinced that he would never be a good student.

 I was not convinced.  Here’s why.  My friend accidently wandered into an advanced physics class on the first day of classes.  That he would show up in the wrong class was no surprise.  He’d never taken physics.  The teacher assigned the class a challenging project to be submitted in a week.  My friend was so intimidated by the class which he thought was a beginning physics class and the teacher that he decided to drop the class.  The night before the large project was due, my friend suddenly decided that he wanted to try to turn in the project to prevent a failing grade from dooming him to fail the class before he could withdraw.  He worked all night.  He drank coffee.  He forced himself to write something down that might pass as an answer to the questions.  Early the next morning he slid his project under the teacher’s office door, went home, and collapsed into bed. 

Several days later he learned three things.  First, he was the only student to submit the project.  Unbeknownst to him, his fellow students had complained so loudly to the teacher about the project that he postponed the due date by a week.  Second, my friend didn’t even qualify to enroll in the upper level class.  He hadn’t taken the prerequisite class.  Third, the teacher graded the project with an A.  I think of the humorous meme: “That just happened.”  My friend’s “A” stands as an immoveable challenge to the assumption that he is a hopeless student. 

The real world Resurrection of Jesus Christ stands as an immoveable challenge to the assumption that total wipe out is an inevitable outcome.

The Emerging Consensus on Climate

What has emerged in just the last several months is a horrifying narrative about how history will end.  Here’s how it goes: Humanity, mostly the developed nations, will put so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that the planet’s average temperature will climb to levels that will no longer support living things.  The various plants and animals, including humans, developed in the first place and are sustained by a planetary climate that is about 1C cooler on average than the world is experiencing now.  That carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere raises the temperature has enjoyed scientific consensus for decades.   For most of that time climate change has been a strong theory, because scientists hadn’t actual detected warming which would be a statistical calculation.  But in 1988 warmer temperatures began to stray outside of statistical variability.  Warming was beginning to show up.  Since then, dramatic events such as droughts and storms have increasingly shown up in numbers outside of normal deviation.   We no longer have to wait 1000 years for a new July of record-breaking heat.  The measurements match the predictions.

There’s more.  A recent spate of books have made popular the awareness that the planet has warmed before.  Not recently.  Not during human’s time.  Not even during the dinosaur age.  Before that, hundreds of millions of years ago, early life forms died out when earth’s atmosphere carbonated and heated.  These primordial plants and insects and sea monsters went extinct and never re-evolved.  Life came back after each extinction event.  But it returned in new ways.

In sum, the combination of greenhouse theory, measureable warming, and Earth’s habit of occasionally wiping the slate clean of life forms has given us an alarming glimpse at our own demise.    

Most Americans believe it.   News stories of climate catastrophe make up a large fraction of newspaper and website news pieces.  Political candidates believe that climate disaster is real, though they don’t quite say human extinction.  They say, “catastrophic consequences” and “existential threat.”  There are still debates about where a warming climate might lead the world.   A tiny group of scientists think it’s bunk.  Evangelicals simply won’t believe it.   Most of us want to just ignore it.  But even with the doubters and deniers a dominant consensus now fills the news. 

Kids get it better than anyone.  If you took the messages from all of the signs and speeches given at the November 20, 2019 student climate strike, you’d come out with a composit message that might run this way:

It’s worse than we think.  Humanity will exterminate itself in a hundred years.  Coming decades will see a savage struggle for survival.  Preventing the warming may be theoretically possible.  Technology may develop new inventions that will take carbon out of the atmosphere.  A sliver of time is left.  But we must act now to pull together a level of cooperation among peoples that has never happened.  And it will require abrupt and thoroughgoing change, another unprecedented factor.   

Two Stories—Resurrection and Climate Catastrophe

I’ve given two seemingly incompatible views of how the human story will play out.  Climate science, paints an alarming picture accompanied by charts and measurements that lead any thoughtful person to the almost unspeakable conclusion that “we’re doomed!”   The story of Jesus’ resurrection says almost precisely the opposite: 

It’s better than you think.  Much better.”   If one man can return from the dead after facing overwhelming opposition and power–power that easily crushed his body–what other glorious surprises lie hidden in the world as it marches forward?

Notice that both the story of climate apocalypse and the Christian story of Jesus’ resurrection are played out in the real world.  In other words, the drama of Jesus’ death, resurrection and continuing ministry are played out on the same stage as are the grim prospects of humanity’s fate.  The stage is history.  The stage is “real life.”  These are not parallel realms, one being “real life” and the other being some sort of spiritual realm. 

A clear message in the resurrection stories is that it happened in the ordinary way that things happen.  If we think we see Jesus alive then the tomb will be empty.  It was.  If Jesus was crucified then his body will be damaged with puncture holes.  It was.  If someone who was dead comes back he’s going to scare and confuse his friends.  That happened. 

I saw an open air passion play about the final hours of Jesus’ life.  At the end of the play the actors wanted the Easter story to have an emotional impact on the audience.  The Risen Jesus was portrayed triumphantly emerging with his left foot, Captain Morgan style, perched on the rolled away stone.  The stage hands threw on all of the lights, especially the colored ones.  The orchestra struck a loud “tuh daa!” flourish.   The scene had so little resemblance to the work-a-day ordinariness of the real resurrection, that it helped me to realize that the real thing was so restrained.

The Kingdom of God

Readers familiar with the New Testament will realize that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ belongs to an even larger reality called the Kingdom of God.  Jesus’ rise from the dead was a glorious instance of the kinds of things that will happen because a new order of God’s presence and influence had merged with the flow of history.  Jesus helpfully compares this merger to what happens when a baker mixes yeast with dough.  The yeast, though small and invisible, changes for the better the character of the loaf.   So the new order of the kingdom, of which the Resurrection is a glowing instance, is quietly present and at work in the flow of human events.

Helping people to look for and enjoy the kingdom’s presence in real life was Jesus’ primary teaching task.  Some people, mostly anonymous peasants who approached Jesus appeared to understand the new leaven in their surroundings.  These were able to tap its power and be healed of dreadful ailments or delivered from difficult situations.  Of course, Jesus’ resurrection is the most compelling manifestation of the Kingdom and we’re still discovering its implications. 

Back to Climate Catastrophe

None of this takes away the grim physics of carbon in the atmosphere, which traps heat, and then traps the human race like pets in a hot automobile.   Thank God that story is not the only one that is being played out.  There exists another possibility.  It’s small and hidden.  But it’s gloriously powerful.  It’s powerful enough to deflect the trajectory of history, which appears in this moment to be rushing towards catastrophe like a runaway train.   We’ve seen it at the empty tomb.  We’ve sensed it in the miracles of Jesus.  What it is is restoration and relief that also seems to thread through history as it unfolds.  Sometimes wonderful things happen that are not accompanied by lights and a big “tuh daaa.”  Sometimes these seem an ordinary development that wouldn’t even qualify as a miracle.  It will probably be mediated through innocent people who sincerely wish to help.  Most of us would not even understand or believe what has happened.  But when it does we’ll realize that we’ve always been held in the palm of an immense loving hand that once upon a time raised Jesus and intends using the same pattern to raise up the whole world.