Jesus is Risen: What Now?
For the followers of Jesus his resurrection was a surprising event and it took them a long time to consider the many options and doorways it opened. As individuals and the Church, we are still unpacking just what the Resurrection implies for our world and ourselves.
It is not surprising that the small band of Jesus’ followers would be confused. After all, the Resurrection was something for which they had no template or understanding. Nothing in the Greco-Roman mind, or the Hebrew mind prepared the way for this awesome singularity to be interpreted. St. Paul would later write that this message “would be a stumbling block to all who tried to understand it by philosophy or appeals to nature.” If God is God, then God operates both within and outside of human history and physics and concepts of time.
The pagan deities of the ancient world were but more than super humans in most cases. A case in point is the Greco-Roman pantheon; its deities were not moral, offered no high call to live above the world, and they themselves were bound by a force greater than themselves: fate! By the time of Jesus, Judaism had turned inward and imaged a God that was far removed from humanity and whose wrath one did not dare to arouse. There was more talk of judgement and punishment than of mercy and grace. Neither the Gentile nor the Jewish mind had room for the notion that God could take human form and live among humanity. Those same minds certainly had no intention of EVER envisioning a human as God!
It may well be that the Resurrection of the Son of God, will never be totally comprehended by human logic, physics or philosophy. I am reminded of the chapter in John Bright’s masterwork entitled A History of Israel in which he comments on the Exodus. He basically says that while all the story of enslavement and later freeing by God’s hand is not totally historically nor archeologically provable, we can say with certainty that something happened! Something that took a wandering group of nomads and formed them into a nation.
So, it may be with the Resurrection. If the account as the Bible gives it does have validity, then God created another singularity just as He had done in creation. Death is no longer an absolute. Israel’s God is indeed stronger than life and death. Humans can have hope, not only of eternal life, but of being adopted into the family of God through belief in the life, death, and resurrection of God’s Son. We, can be forgiven of sin, cleansed and made new creatures in Christ.
What can be said is that billions of humans have embraced the story and been made over by encounters with the living Jesus. In 1Corinthians 15:3-4, we hear the importance St. Paul gives to the resurrection story: “For I delivered to you as of the first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third say, according to the Scriptures…”
Christians are “Resurrection People” and all our Sundays are little Easters. Be in church and celebrate with God’s people the wonderful mystery into which we are adopted.
It is not surprising that the small band of Jesus’ followers would be confused. After all, the Resurrection was something for which they had no template or understanding. Nothing in the Greco-Roman mind, or the Hebrew mind prepared the way for this awesome singularity to be interpreted. St. Paul would later write that this message “would be a stumbling block to all who tried to understand it by philosophy or appeals to nature.” If God is God, then God operates both within and outside of human history and physics and concepts of time.
The pagan deities of the ancient world were but more than super humans in most cases. A case in point is the Greco-Roman pantheon; its deities were not moral, offered no high call to live above the world, and they themselves were bound by a force greater than themselves: fate! By the time of Jesus, Judaism had turned inward and imaged a God that was far removed from humanity and whose wrath one did not dare to arouse. There was more talk of judgement and punishment than of mercy and grace. Neither the Gentile nor the Jewish mind had room for the notion that God could take human form and live among humanity. Those same minds certainly had no intention of EVER envisioning a human as God!It may well be that the Resurrection of the Son of God, will never be totally comprehended by human logic, physics or philosophy. I am reminded of the chapter in John Bright’s masterwork entitled A History of Israel in which he comments on the Exodus. He basically says that while all the story of enslavement and later freeing by God’s hand is not totally historically nor archeologically provable, we can say with certainty that something happened! Something that took a wandering group of nomads and formed them into a nation.
So, it may be with the Resurrection. If the account as the Bible gives it does have validity, then God created another singularity just as He had done in creation. Death is no longer an absolute. Israel’s God is indeed stronger than life and death. Humans can have hope, not only of eternal life, but of being adopted into the family of God through belief in the life, death, and resurrection of God’s Son. We, can be forgiven of sin, cleansed and made new creatures in Christ.
What can be said is that billions of humans have embraced the story and been made over by encounters with the living Jesus. In 1Corinthians 15:3-4, we hear the importance St. Paul gives to the resurrection story: “For I delivered to you as of the first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third say, according to the Scriptures…”
Christians are “Resurrection People” and all our Sundays are little Easters. Be in church and celebrate with God’s people the wonderful mystery into which we are adopted.
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