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Tuesday, 1 April 2008

Reactions to the resurrection (2)

What of the meaning of the resurrection though? Why is it so important and how can it affect us today if we believe that it occurred?

Again, two ideas drawn from this account (Mark 15.46 - 16.8). First, the message of the young man to the women (Mark 16. 7) – “He is going … ahead of you”. Literally, this means that Jesus had gone to Galilee where he would show himself to the disciples when they followed him there. But, at another level, it indicates what Jesus’ resurrection means. We read in 1 Corinthians Chapter 15 that Jesus has been raised from death as the guarantee that we will also be raised from death. He is described as being the first fruits of those who have died. In rising from the dead, he has gone ahead of us into the new risen body and existence that we shall experience in future when Jesus returns to this earth to fully bring God’s Kingdom into existence here.

When Jesus walked the earth he looked ahead to that future time when the Kingdom of God will be made perfect, and all suffering will come to an end. But he also announced that, because of him, there is a sense in which that Kingdom has already begun. When he healed sick people and brought good news to the poor it was a sign that the Kingdom had come. In the same way, when he overcame death by rising from the dead he became the first fruits of the Kingdom, an example of what we will all become in future.

Jesus wants us to be signs of God’s Kingdom in the same way that he was. He commanded us, his followers, to love in the way that he did. He wanted people to see us practically demonstrating love, so that we will clearly be recognised as men and women who belong to God. When Christians take action on behalf of the world’s poorest communities, as we will be doing shortly by collecting for Christian Aid, we not only put into practice the values of the Kingdom of God here and now but also become signs of what the Kingdom will be like when it is made perfect in eternity. That is what it means to pray, ‘Your Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.’

So, by the resurrection, Jesus has gone ahead of us in signing and establishing the Kingdom of God and calls us to follow where he leads. In this way, as the theologian Jurgen Moltmann says, the “resurrection of Christ does not mean a new possibility within the world and its history, but a new possibility altogether for the world, for existence, and for history.” That’s the first indication of what resurrection means in this passage.

The second, takes us back to the women and their position in a patriarchal society. God deliberately chooses women to discover Jesus' resurrection because the Kingdom of God, of which the resurrection is the first fruits, is to be a place of equality and inclusion. In his ministry, Jesus consistently included in God’s Kingdom those people in Jewish society that were excluded – he included women in his followers, he brought lepers and possessed people back into the community by healing them, he ate and drank with tax collectors, sinners and prostitutes.

Therefore, it is significant that it is people who were thought of as being second class in the society of his day who become the first witnesses to his resurrection. In the Kingdom of God which Jesus’ resurrection inaugurates, no one is second class and this is why the Apostle Paul writes in his letters, “there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles, between slaves and free men, between men and women; you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Just as we are called to be signs of God’s Kingdom in the way that we love, so we are also called to be signs of God’s Kingdom by the way in which we include those who are excluded in our day. In our churches we need to be able to demonstrate that we are all one in Christ Jesus by there being no difference in the way that we accept men and women, white and black, rich and poor, straight and gay, non-disabled and disabled, the settled and the migrant, people of faith and people of no faith. We are called to be a people of liberation who cross the divides erected by our society. Who, as Jurgen Moltmann has said, in solidarity enter “the brotherhood of those who, in their society, are visibly living in the shadow of the cross: the poor, the handicapped, the people society has rejected, the prisoners and the persecuted.”

Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits of a new way of being human – a way of being human that ultimately knows no death, no grief, no crying, no pain, no inequality and no exclusion. Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits of the healing and renewal of human beings, human society and the entire world. This is the meaning of the resurrection. This is where we, and our world, can be heading, if we get onboard with God.

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Peter Case - Dream About You.

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