by Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
John 20: 19-31
“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.”—N. T. Wright (b. 1948), Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church
Today we celebrate Easter. Easter is the most important Christian holy day, because this is the day that we remember that Jesus rose from the dead. He was dead, but God raised Him from the dead. This past week We have been reflecting on Jesus’ suffering and death. Often our focus is his life and teachings. none of that is in itself particularly unique. Other wise people have taught. Other miracle workers have healed. Other martyrs have suffered and died. Perhaps He should have been remembered, if He was remembered at all, as one among many great teachers of history.
But He rose from the dead. That changes everything.
He rose from the dead. And suddenly we have to say, “Wait a minute—not just anybody rises again. In fact, except for him, nobody has.” So we need to look backwards at everything and reread in the light of this new, extraordinary fact: he rose from the dead. All of the sudden, His teachings become far more meaningful than Gandhi’s or King’s or Confucius or the Buddha—because He rose from the dead. Suddenly His actions take on far more meaning than those of Mandela or Theresa of Avila or the Prophetess Deborah—because He rose from the dead. Suddenly the circumstances of His death carry more weight than Archbishop Romero or Servitus or Socrates—because He rose from the dead.
That one fact changes everything. And it is the only fact that makes Jesus a world-changing character: HE ROSE FROM THE DEAD.
If Jesus rose from the dead, you have to ask how? Why? What does it mean? It’s a cosmic anomaly, perhaps even the very crisis point of history. Was it something about Jesus that made it possible for Him to rise from the dead? That is why, when His earliest disciples looked back on what Jesus taught and said about Himself, they could come to only one conclusion: He was the Son of God. He was God in human form, walking the earth. Who else could have risen from the dead?
So the events of His life take on a razor sharp focus. His suffering and death become especially meaningful. If Jesus was the Son of God, or even God in the flesh, then how could He have allowed Himself to be crucified and to die?
What an incredible, unbelievable act of humility—for God to become human, to suffer at human hands, and to die. And so the earliest Christians, looking back at Jesus’ teachings, suddenly realize, “When He was talking about humility, and self-sacrifice, and love, He wasn’t talking about them the same way other wise people and martyrs talk about them. This was God talking about them. He wasn’t just teaching us a good way to live, He was teaching us the central principles of the universe, the whole point of creation. Forgiveness, humility, self-sacrifice, love for others, even for your enemies—these aren’t just pie-in-the-sky ideals. They are the rules and purpose of history itself. And to prove that to us, God humbly took on human form and sacrificed Himself for us, for the sake of forgiveness and love, even for one’s enemies.
So now we know that love and self-sacrifice and forgiveness are the central principles of the universe, and that God in person practices them for our sakes—and we know it because Jesus rose from the dead.
Let’s apply that same line of deductive reasoning to another aspect of Jesus’ rising from the dead. It was a literal, historical event. Jesus walked around, people touched the holes in His hands, people ate with Him, people who had watched Him die and buried His body. He wasn’t a spirit. He wasn’t a ghost. He rose and was flesh and blood and alive and breathing just like us.
So why do we believe that our own resurrections, and the Kingdom that He promised, are for another world or another time? It happened in real time, on the real earth, in a real nation called Judea, to a real man who walked the earth. Jesus’ earliest disciples were Jews, who’d been taught that God’s Kingdom wasn’t in heaven, in some far-away place—it was to come to earth. God would establish God’s rule in the land of the living. There would be a return to the way things were in the Garden of Eden—humans would walk hand in hand with one another, with God, and with God’s creation. They also believed that when That Day came, That Day when God’s rule is forever established, the Dead would rise—and guess what? Someone dead has risen. The earliest Christians called Jesus “the first fruits of the resurrection of the dead.”
In John, Jesus says, “I have come that you might have life–and have it abundantly.” Yes, there is resurrection and eternal life after death. But his point is that our abundant eternal life begins in the here and now. our life in the Kingdom doesn’t begin in the next world. It begins in this one, and we know it because it was in this world that Jesus rose from the dead.
The establishment of God’s Kingdom has begun. And it isn’t pie-in-the–sky somewhere else—it is here on earth. What we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer is coming true: Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN. As theologian N.T. Wright puts it: “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.”
And so, amazingly, and hard as it is to believe, we aren’t supposed to leave here and go to heaven to live forever when we die: heaven is coming to earth, and we can live at least a portion of it in this life, now. The healing has begun. The day is coming when this world God created, loved, died, and rose for, will be fully and completely reunited with God.
And the good news is, that the Kingdom has already begun in our lives. We who believe in the resurrected Lord have incontrovertible proof that Jesus’ teachings of love, humility, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice have divine power to heal the world and save humanity. We know it because Jesus rose from the dead.
We live in an age that wants proof. We don’t really have great proof that love, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice work in our troubled world. Nor do we have any really concrete proof that God’s kingdom has actually begun the colonization of this world. Furthermore, many of us aren’t even sure what to make of this resurrection story. Somebody is always coming along with some new “proof” that Jesus never rose from the dead. As if something like that could ever be absolutely proven or disproven.
Here’s what we do know. Something incredible happened after Jesus died. The disciples believed Jesus rose from the dead. They took that to mean that the power of God was at work in the real world to make the Kingdom of God a living reality on earth. And so they set out, these Jewish peasant fishermen and peasant women like Mary Magdalene, and later the Greek housewives that Paul converted, to change the world. And they did. These unlikely leaders changed the world because they believed Jesus rose from the dead. Jesus rose from the dead, and it changed them; and because it changed them, by God’s grace they were able to change everything.
Why should it be any different for us today? We still claim that Jesus rose from the dead. If we believe that, all the rest falls into place. Love, humility, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice are the central principles of the universe. The Kingdom of God is colonizing the earth. All of it starts from the same premise: Jesus rose from the dead.
Blessed are we who have not seen, and yet still believe.