Today I continue to feature the writings and theology of +Tom Wright, this week’s featured Anglican theologian and writer. In honor of All Saints’ Day, which was celebrated this past Monday, the main focus of Bishop Wright’s writings is on New Creation and Resurrection.
On the Resurrection:
And that’s why ‘resurrection’ is what matters, rather than just ‘going to heaven’. Oh, if you belong to Jesus you will go to heaven to be with him; that’s what paradise means. But that’s just the long, bright tunnel before the new [creation] begins. And when God makes new heavens and new earth, he will raise you from the dead and give you a new body so that you can live in that new world and, indeed, help God to run it. That’s the deal; that’s what the New Testament promises, even though many generations of Christians have never even begun to realize it.
Now we come to the point. When Jesus was raised from the dead on the first Easter day, it wasn’t simply as though he’d gone on ahead of us through the tunnel and out the other side. In Jesus’ resurrection a bit of God’s future, of God’s new heaven and earth, has come forward in time. You’ve seen the film Back to the Future? Well, the point of the resurrection is that at Easter a bit of the future God’s promised future has come forwards to meet us, ‘back to the present’.
I know many people find this confusing, so let me try and say it a different way and see if it helps. You know that when it’s ten o’clock in the evening here it’s already ten o’clock in the morning in Australia? Perhaps you have friends or relatives in Australia or New Zealand; sometimes they may phone you, forgetting what time it is here, and they wake you up in the middle of the night. Well, what happens with the resurrection is like this. This whole world is still in the old time ten o’clock at night, if you like. Evil and death are still at work. We’re all still asleep and we think nothing is ever going to be different. But suddenly we get, not a phone call, but a visit, from someone who is living in New Time. He is already in the new day. He has gone through death and out into God’s new world, God’s new creation, and to our astonishment he’s come forward into our world, which is still in Old Time, to tell us that the day has in fact dawned and that even though we feel sleepy and it still seems dark out there the new world has begun and we’d better wake up and get busy.
Only gradually, and particularly when [the first disciples] met Jesus, with his body fully alive, indeed, more alive than it had ever been, because it had been through death and out the other side–only gradually did they realize what had happened. In his death, Jesus had taken all the sin and death and shame and sorrow of the world upon himself, so that by letting it do its worst to him he had destroyed its power, which means that now there is nothing to stop the new creation coming into being. Jesus’ resurrection body is the first bit of the new creation, the sign of the new world that is to come. In terms of Good Friday as the sixth day, and Holy Saturday as the seventh day, the day when God rested after creation, the day when Jesus rested after redemption, Easter Day is the eighth day, the first day of the new week. This isn’t the end; it’s the beginning.
—Christians at the Cross
On the Church’s mission:
And that is why Easter is the start of the church’s mission. Let’s be quite clear. The church’s mission isn’t about telling more and more people that if they accept Jesus they will go to heaven. That is true, as far as it goes (though we ought to be telling them about the new heavens and new earth rather than just ‘heaven’), but it’s not the point of our mission. The point is that if God’s new creation has already begun, those of us who have been wakened up in the middle of the night are put to work to make more bits of new creation happen within the world as it still is. And that is why we need to leave behind, on the cross, all the bits and pieces of the old creation that have made us sad, that have depressed us and our communities, and start to pray for vision and wisdom to know where God can and will make new creation happen in our lives, in our hearts, in our homes and not least in our communities. That’s what ‘regeneration’ is all about.
—Christians at the Cross
