Pastor Ken Ponders Resurrection Hope
One of the most exciting Christian writers of our day is N. T. Wright, a bishop in the Church of England. Since the 1990’s, he has taken on in public debates and in books those who question the historical reality and ultimate importance of Jesus rising from the dead. He has challenges the lies some of the phony scholars who are interviewed on The History Channel, on the PBS Religion and Ethics and All Things Considered aswell on CNN TV and its Internet site Belief Blog. These include John Dominic Crossan, Bart Ehrman and Marcus Borg. One could also mention frequent public television pop philosophers as Wayne Dyer and Deepak Chopra.
Bishop Wright wants Christians to challenge the general godless worldview in Britain and North America that distorts the message of this Easter season. Easter is absolutely about believers participating in the New Life in the Resurrected Lord Jesus. Easter is NOT all about chocolate bunny rabbits, multicolored eggs and new clothes worn only for that day.
Bishop Wright’s book, Surprised by Hope, helps us refocus to emphasize that heaven can be experienced now in this life as well as after death. Jesus’s Resurrection is not only about eternal life with God after death—it is about joy and hope now!
Here are some quotes from Bishop Wright to challenge and encourage us:
Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about when it proclaims ‘May Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’
What we have at the moment isn't, as the old liturgies used to say, 'the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,' but a fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end. The Resurrection completes Jesus bold announcement of the inauguration of God's kingdom NOW in and through Jesus. It is the decisive event demonstrating that God's kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven. The message of Easter is that God's new world has been unveiled in His Son, Jesus Christ and that you're now invited to belong to it.
The point of the resurrection is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die; what you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it. What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less ugly or a little more bearable. They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom.
May we all take to heart what Bishop Wright has written as we daily walk with our Risen Lord Jesus Christ!
(All quotations taken from Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church by N. T. Wright published by HarperOne, 2008.)