Resurrection

These thoughts from a sermon by NT Wright about Christ's resurrection challenged me. If you come from an American background, I hope it challenges you too:

Denying the resurrection is a necessary part of the Enlightenment worldview. The Enlightenment split off God from the world and denied that God could or would act in the world. That's the culture we've been living in for the last 200 years, that denial. God was upstairs and we were downstairs. Christian faith enables you (Enlightenment allows it) to enjoy a private spiritual relationship upstairs with God, but that couldn't and shouldn't affect how the world runs. God was banished upstairs and we humans, we in northwestern Europe, we in America, would get on with running the downstairs world the way we wanted to.

The denial of bodily resurrection in the scholarship and popular writing of the last 200 years has gone hand-in-glove with the political position of the contemporary Sadducees.
"We are in power. We run this world. And we aren't going to allow any messages of revolution of a new world order of Jesus to disturb our privileged position." When, as a New Testament scholar, I fight day by day the battle with the skepticism that dogs my own discipline, I have come to believe that that is part of the larger, cultural battle. It isn't just a battle with the Enlightenment philosophy at one level; it's a battle with the whole Enlightenment package - culture, politics, the lot.

This leads to the necessary application of all this to our own day and situation. With the resurrection of Jesus, God created a new world and sent Jesus' followers off to announce it to the world. If you go to the resurrection chapters in Luke 24, or in Matthew, or Mark, or John, and say, "What do the evangelists think this stuff means; why are we telling this story?" The answer is not, "Jesus is risen again, therefore, we can go to heaven when we die and be with him." It's interesting they never say that, those resurrection chapters. Rather, they say, "Jesus is risen from the dead. Therefore, God's new creation has begun, and you are commissioned to go off and make it happen." That's the emphasis. And it's a new world of justice and freedom; it's the exodus of the world, the return-from-exile world, the world where Jesus already reigns as Lord, it's the world with good news for all, especially, as in the New Testament, for the poor.

As we move into a new century, with all the contradictions of post-modernity swirling around us, and now the sense of living in a dangerous and scary world with the forces of violence and hatred suddenly unleashed in our midst, we have to ask: What might God's new world look like? Start with Easter and what dreams will come? What are we, the privileged ones, doing to help implement God's victory over evil, over death, over poverty, over slavery? Where in the world today is the 'exodus' as God listens to the cry of the slaves who cannot help themselves and is assuring them that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?