Twelve Months of Sundays. N.T. Wright
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catching up the old within it but going far beyond. This is a body that somehow lives in earth and heaven simultaneously (easier to imagine when you remind yourself that, in biblical thought, they are complementary and overlapping spheres of God’s created order), though it is sometimes more appropriate to think of it as basically inhabiting one or the other. It is the beginning of that new creation which will only be complete when heaven and earth are finally married. The fact that we are obviously at the borders of language here is no shame. Where else should you be on Easter morning?
Part of the strange truth of Easter is that it is about us, too. ‘Your life is hidden with Christ in God.’ You are already a citizen of the heavenly world. So why still behave as though you weren’t?
The Second Sunday of Easter
Acts 2.14a, 22–32
1 Peter 1.3–9
John 20.19–31
Jesus’ resurrection scattered new meanings all around, like light reflecting a thousand ways off a priceless jewel. The first thing was the validation of Jesus’ messianic ministry. His powerful deeds had commended him to Israel, but not everyone had believed that God was at work in him. The resurrection unveiled the truth; and the way of getting a handle on it was to tell the scriptural story and to show that it had now reached its dramatic conclusion. The story of David, culled here from various psalms, pointed the way. Nobody could have supposed that the crucified Jesus was the Messiah (despite what some have suggested, there is no pre-Christian evidence that any Jews believed in such a thing); but the resurrection declared, before anything else, that Jesus really was, and is, the Messiah. His life really had been messianic, and God had validated it. Early Christianity was messianic to the core; the explanation was that God had raised Jesus from the dead.
The second meaning that quickly followed was that the Messiah’s followers now shared in God’s new world. We too easily read 1 Peter 1 in terms simply of a supernatural ‘salvation’, the heritage which is ‘kept safe in heaven for you’. But the image is not of us going to heaven to experience it, but of heaven as the celestial cupboard where God keeps the wonderful things that will one day be brought out for all to see. The resurrection has opened up the vista of a whole restored creation, under the saving lordship of the Messiah. This is the heritage that can never go mouldy. And those who belong to the Messiah discover that the new creation has already infected them; the new stirrings of faith, hope and above all joy within them are the signs of this new life, new birth, so that they are simultaneously out of tune with the way the world still is and joyfully in tune with the new world that will appear when Jesus is ‘revealed’. Peter, like Paul in some passages, thinks here of Jesus as present though invisible. The risen Lord will one day be seen again, as he was in the upper room, and those who now love him will find their true selves (their ‘souls’, v. 9, though the word to a Jew hardly carried the disembodied sense it has for us) rescued from the trials that beset them in the present.
John’s resurrection accounts are full of fresh meaning, but the key to this passage is the new commission that follows from the vision of faith. ‘As the Father sent me, so I send you’: the messianic life of Jesus is to be replicated through Jesus’ people, as, with the breath of new creation in their nostrils, they go out with the message of forgiveness, and warning too. Thomas’ cameo appearance sums up the paradox of faith from the whole gospel: touching is possible, seeing is enough, but believing is best of all.
The Third Sunday of Easter
Acts 2.14a, 36–41
1 Peter 1.17–23
Luke 24.13–35
Today’s readings bubble over with the excitement of the new moment that has dawned in Israel’s story, in the world’s story, with the resurrection. It isn’t merely that God is offering a new kind of spiritual experience, or that there is now a new belief in life after death (which most Jews believed in anyway). It is the sense that something has happened, as a result of which everything is different.
But the thing which had happened was emphatically not what was expected. Theories about ‘cognitive dissonance’, that highfalutin pseudo-medical term used by some to say that the disciples were so overwhelmed with disappointment at Jesus’ crucifixion that they simply went on believing what they had believed anyway, simply won’t do. ‘We had hoped’, say the two on the road to Emmaus, ‘that he was the one who would redeem Israel.’ But (the implication runs) they crucified him, so obviously he wasn’t. Everybody knows that a crucified Messiah is a contradiction in terms. We are just another failed messianic movement.
They were like people on a hillside, watching eagerly for the sunrise. (This image works better in the tropics where there’s no twilight.) Disoriented, they are facing the wrong way. The expected moment comes and goes, and nothing happens. Then they become aware that, though the sky they are scanning remains dark, light seems to be shining anyway. With a strange excitement they turn around, to see the sun shining in full strength in the very place they least expected it.
It was the Scriptures, not least (we must assume) the Davidic promises, that warmed their hearts with the thought that they had been looking in the wrong direction, and nudged them to turn around and face the real dawn. The biblical story was all about God bringing redemption, new life, through death and out the other side. To expect the ransoming of Israel in the sense they had cherished was to look in the wrong direction. The ransoming (an Exodus word, of course) had indeed occurred, but it was the deep, ultimate act that freed human beings from ‘futility’ (1 Peter 1.18: a human life that, failing to reflect God, decays and self-destructs). The new creation brought to birth at Easter would now be born within human lives, creating love, trust and hope. The transforming power lay precisely in God’s word (1.23).
Peter’s challenge to the Pentecost crowd contains perhaps the earliest ‘theology of the cross’ in the New Testament. (You may need to include some extra verses to get the full thrust.) Jesus’ dying and rising has broken through into a new way of being Israel, a new way of being human; so, urges Peter, turn quickly from your headlong flight into ruin, share in the new-Exodus life of which baptism is the sign and seal, celebrate God’s one-off act of forgiveness, and pass it on to everyone else. Now there’s a message as urgently needed today as ever it was.
The Fourth Sunday of Easter
Acts 2.42–47
1 Peter 2.19–25
John 10.1–10
A student of mine spent a long vacation working with local churches in central Africa. Next term, the College Head asked him, in my presence, what he wanted to do with his degree. ‘Work in third world development,’ he replied. ‘Then why’, asked the Provost, an economist himself, ‘aren’t you reading Politics and Economics?’ The student didn’t even blink. ‘Because Theology is so much more relevant,’ he shot back.
Read Acts 2 and see why. Jesus had launched the new-covenant movement. His followers, like the Qumran community, believed that they, the renewed Israel, should live as a family. They belonged to each other, as brothers and sisters; and close families, in that culture at least, shared a purse. (This, by the way, is why it’s so misleading when non-sexist translations render ‘brothers’ as ‘friends’ and the like. Why not ‘family’?) If God had now acted to bring forgiveness at every level, how could they not forgive debts as they had been forgiven?
The so-called primitive communism of the early Church had little to do, then, with a belief that the world was coming to an end, and a great deal to do with the sense of fulfilment: the world of debt, the world of injustice,