Today I continue to feature the theology and writings of +Tom Wright, this week’s featured Anglican theologian and writer. To commemorate All Saints Day, this week’s excerpts will focus mainly on the Resurrection and New Creation.
On what happens to Christians after death:
New Testament language about the bodily death of Christians, and what happens to them thereafter, makes no distinction whatever in this respect between those who have attained significant holiness or Christ-likeness in the present and those who haven’t. ‘My desire’, says Paul in Philippians 1.22, ‘is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.’ He doesn’t for a moment imply that this ‘being with Christ’ is something which he will experience but which the Philippians will find terrifying and want to postpone. His state (being with Christ) will indeed be exalted, but it will be no different, no more exalted, than that of every single Christian after death. He will not be, in that sense, a ‘saint’, differentiated from mere ‘souls’ who wait in another place or state. Nor does Paul imply that this ‘departing and being with Christ’ is the same thing as the eventual resurrection of the body, which he describes vividly later in the same letter (3.20-21). No: all the Christian dead have ‘departed’ and are ‘with Christ’. The only other idea Paul offers to explain where the Christian dead are now and what they are doing is that of ‘sleeping in Christ’. He uses this idea frequently (1 Corinthians 7.39; 11.30; 15.6, 18, 20, 51; 1 Thessalonians 4.13-15), and some have thought that by it he must mean an unconscious state, from which one would be brought back to consciousness at the resurrection so much so, perhaps, that it will seem as though we have passed straight from the one to the other. The probability is, though, that this is a strong metaphor, a way of reminding us about the ‘waking up’ which will be the resurrection. Had the postmortem state been unconscious, would Paul have thought of it as ‘far better’ than what he had in the present?
—For All the Saints: Remembering the Christian Departed
On the meaning and significance of Easter:
[Easter] is not the end. It is the beginning. Yes, I grant you this is the end of the bit of the journey you and I have been making together. It is always a wonderful thing to share a pilgrimage through Holy Week, and to think and pray with friends as we follow Jesus to the cross and the tomb. And often Easter does feet like the end of the story, of that particular journey. Well, it isn’t. It’s just the beginning. My job now is to help you celebrate the first day of God’s new creation. Because, you see, that’s what it’s all about. The gospels don’t really reach a conclusion. They point on to something more that’s still to come. But what is this ‘something more’? What is Easter all about? And how can it help us find the hope we need that’s going to give us energy for the fresh tasks that lie ahead of us now, here in this community?
This is where many Christians have gone wrong, mainly because they haven’t been listening to the music. We’ve been talking about the tune which is the story of Jesus, the bass part which is the Old Testament background, and the middle parts which are about us and our world. Well, too many Christians have listened to the tune about Jesus’ resurrection and they have assumed that it’s supposed to harmonize with a bass part that says that the point of it all is simply to go to heaven when you die. Jesus died and went to heaven, and so will we. But that’s not what the Easter stories are about at all. It’s hard to get our heads around this, so let’s take it step by step.
People sometimes talk as if ‘resurrection’ was what happened at once, as soon as you die. It isn’t. Jesus died on Good Friday and he wasn’t raised from the dead until three days later. Where was he in between? Well, in Luke’s gospel he says to the thief, “Today you’ll be with me in Paradise.” Paradise isn’t the final destination. It’s the time of rest and bliss which God’s people pass through in order to get to the final destination. The Paradise we are promised is a place of light and rest for God’s people. But the point is that Paradise isn’t your final destination. So all talk of simply going to heaven, as though that were the end of the story, isn’t going to help.
Where are we heading, then? Go back to the bass part, to the Old Testament: and, once more, we’re in Isaiah. Isaiah speaks of new heavens and new earth–and the New Testament writers pick this up in various ways. The way it seems to work is like this. When God made this lovely world, he wasn’t making junk. He doesn’t want to throw it away and do something completely different, as though the idea of space, time and matter was a bad one from the start. No: he wants to abolish, from within this world, everything that corrupts and defaces and distorts his beautiful creation, so that he can give the world a giant makeover. New heavens and new earth–like the present one only with everything that’s true and beautiful and lovely made even better, and everything that’s bad and sad and degrading abolished for ever. That’s what we’re promised. Read Isaiah 65 again and see.
—Christians at the Cross
