Bishop Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, is one of the most prolific writers among the Church of England bishops of our day. He is a prominent New Testament scholar, whose impressive list of titles ranges from academic volumes to more popular works for the general reader. He has made it his mission to correct what he sees as the wrong direction the Church has taken in its preaching of the Gospel.
According to Tom Wright, we have been short-changing people by encouraging them to hope in something far less than God has in mind for us. For generations, if not centuries, the Church has taught people that salvation means we get to go to heaven when we die. And that, says Wright, is not at all what the New Testament is about. The unfolding message of the gospels and other New Testament writings is that God’s plan for the redemption of the world is something much bigger: not just about the eternal destiny of individual souls, but of the whole created universe.
As Jesus went about proclaiming that God’s kingdom had come into the world, teaching and healing and driving out evil spirits, his closest disciples began to guess that he was indeed the Lord’s Messiah, the anointed ruler who would lead his people to victory. They understood this in political terms, because this was what the Jewish people had always hoped for: liberation from the hated Roman occupiers, the power to govern themselves. But these hopes were dashed to pieces when Jesus was first arrested, then found guilty of treason, tortured and executed by crucifixion. It was the utter defeat of everything they had longed for.
It seemed like the end of their story; but God had planned something different. On the third day, the tomb where the dead leader’s body had been laid, was suddenly found empty. There was no longer any corpse, and from various parts of the city came reports that Jesus had been seen alive. The disciples were no more gullible than anyone else, yet they came to believe that the seemingly impossible really had happened: Jesus had been raised from the dead. And this meant that fears of the Messiah’s defeat were unfounded. On the contrary, Jesus, his message and mission were all completely vindicated by God, and he was proved to be the One who would bring full salvation to all the peoples of the earth. The new age that he had come to announce broke into the world in that dawn of the first day of the week, and nothing would ever be the same again.
Two thousand years later we still wait in faith and hope for the fulfilment of that new age which has been coming in ever since. There have been many setbacks and disasters which might cause us to waver, and in so many ways the world still looks very unsaved, but the vision of the New Testament remains the same. The closing chapters of Revelation unveil a magnificent panorama of the new heaven and the new earth, heaven coming down and breaking into the old order to make the universe anew. So what we are led to hope for is not some disembodied spiritual eternity: as Tom Wright says, if that’s all we’ve got to look forward to, then death will not have been defeated at all, and we will just have died. No, what God has had in mind all along, is that through the Resurrection of Jesus, not only we who believe, but the whole creation will be made new.
As St Paul writes: The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. (Romans 8.19-21)
Jesus is risen, alleluia! The new age really has dawned upon the world!
Published in the Marston Times, April 2009