10^th July 2010

hdr tree by Paulo Brandão

The Christian significance of Easter and the resurrection in many ways has been subjected to the distortions and individualism of our current self-focused culture.

Martin Luther's definition of sin was "Humans turned in on themselves" and much of our contemporary way of thinking is shaped in a way that interprets the resurrection in light of our own personal needs. The chorus we often sing puts the question, "You ask me how I know He lives? He lives within my heart." While this is true, the significance of resurrection reaches beyond this sort of personal comfort and reassurance.

Let's make no mistake, the reason the early Christians were so joyful was because they knew themselves to be living not so much in the last days as in the first days...the opening days of God's new creation.

In his gospel John tells us twice that Easter Day is the first day of the week. (John 20:1&19) It isn't just that Easter Day happened to be on a Sunday. John wants his readers to figure out that Easter day is the first day of God's new creation. It was the birthday of God's new world. In other words there is a universal, even cosmic dimension to the significance of the resurrection. In the Genesis story God finished all his work on Friday, the sixth day. The great shout "It is finished" (John 19:30) looks all the way back to the sixth day of Genesis 1 when, with the creation of human beings in His own image, God finished the initial creation. It is in his bodily resurrection as a human being that Jesus fulfils, finishes the destiny of the human race from the sixth day of creation. (1 Cor 15:27) God has put all things in subjection under his feet.

Saturday is the Sabbath rest between Good Friday and Easter Day.

Just as the Spirit brooded over the waters of creation so the Spirit broods over the world, the chaos and darkness of the Easter events, ready to bring it bursting to springtime life. Mary goes to the tomb while it is still dark and she encounters Jesus in the garden. In the morning light she thinks he is the gardener, as in one sense he is. This is the garden of the new creation. This is the new Genesis...beginning.

On this first day, in the evening when the doors were shut for fear, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said, "Peace be to you." (John 20:19) "Saying this, Jesus showed them his hands and his side" (John 20:20) Having defeated death and the powers of darkness Jesus repeated the word that begins a new era. "Peace be with you". A new creation, a new order of being had burst upon the startled old world, opening up new possibilities. Jesus said, "As the Father sent me so I send you". And he breathed on them as once, long ago, God breathed his breath of life. "Receive the Holy Spirit. Forgive sins and they are forgiven; retain them and they are retained." God breathes into human nostrils his own breath and we become living stewards looking after the garden, shaping God's world as his obedient image-bearers.

What Jesus did was not a mere example of a larger truth, it was itself the climactic event and fact of cosmic history. From then on everything is different. Creation itself is now on track to be set free. Revelation 21 speaks of it in terms of a new heaven and a new earth. This means today we live in the bright interval, the new age, the already begun new world between Easter and the final consummation.

Bearing God's image is not just a fact, it is a vocation. We are called to reflect into the world the creative love of God. Paul uses two images that go together to describe our vocation the garden and that of the builder. (1 Cor 3: 10-15)

An Empowered Vocation.

Paul points to the unique foundation of Jesus as the basis for a building to be constructed. Our task is to implement Jesus' unique, once for all achievement. As young architects we now construct the kingdom building, the dwelling place for God's Spirit. We are not oiling the wheels of a machine that is soon gone. The Spirit of the Master Builder dwells in us nudging and guiding us, enabling us to build. If we will obey our materials will not be wood, hay, stubble but will turn out to have been gold, silver and precious stone....our work will last. We are made for each other with a common purpose to work together, to plant, to water, while God gives growth.

Our calling is to find new ways to announce the kingdom, to tell the story of redemption, to rebuild the house and replant the garden, to declare that the powers have been defeated, that the kingdom has come in Jesus, that the new way of being human has been unveiled. Shaping our world is never for a Christian a matter of going out arrogantly thinking we can just get on with re-organizing the world according to our own model. It is a matter of sharing and bearing the pain of the world so that the crucified love of God -in Christ might bring healing.

The New Testament tells us repeatedly that to build on Jesus foundation will be to find the cross etched into the pattern of our life and work. We will find ourselves in the garden of Gethsemane. It would be easy to withdraw as a private Christian but this would be to live in denial. We are called to a Gethsemane-like anguish. Paul speaks of the whole creation being in travail, so we ourselves groan in prayer because we long for renewal and final liberation. We are called to be truly human. It is nothing less than the life of God within us that enables us to be remade in God's image.

Following Christ in the power of the Spirit means Living the New Creation,

"Bringing to our world the shape of the gospel: forgiveness, the best news that anyone can ever hear, for all who yearn for it, and judgement for all who insist on dehumanising themselves and others."

The early church was a resurrection movement and this was central to belief. The human race has been in exile, exiled from the garden, shut out of the house. Our task is to announce in deed and word that the exile is over, to speak of healing and forgiveness, to act boldly in God's world and in the power of the Spirit.

For the early Christians it was as if God had started to plant an orchard in the garden of their lives that would finally envelope the whole creation. The new age had arrived and that is how they lived, behaved and ordered their lives. They organised their lives as if they were the people of the new covenant, the new creation.

In a radical way today that may not always be understood by others we need to break from the dominant patterns of our culture to redesign our whole world view around the fixed point of Jesus resurrection and the new creation, not just as another neat idea but as an actual present reality.

Adapted by Rev Ted (E.A) Curnow July 2010