Theologian Paula Gooder describes how Jesus’s resurrection would have been interpreted as a sign that the end times—of justice, mercy, and love—had begun:
To a lot of Jews living at the time of Jesus, believing that a resurrection had happened would have meant believing that the end times … had already started.
No wonder, then, that the earliest disciples struggled to get their heads around Jesus’ resurrection. Jesus had risen from the dead but no one else had; Jesus had risen from the dead but the world was, apparently, no different from the way it had been before: the Romans still occupied Palestine, the poor were still the poor, Israel was still downtrodden. A lot of the New Testament writers made sense of this by seeing Jesus’ resurrection as a radical and transforming event which changed the world now…. For them, Jesus’ resurrection signaled far, far more than a dead person living; it marked the start of a whole new way of being. The end times had begun, but not in their entirety. [1]
We can be encouraged by glimpses of resurrection in the here and now:
The world is as it always was with its wars, heartache, poverty, and oppressions, but … in the midst of conflict and aggression, we can, from time to time, see moments of reconciliation and of compassion. Occasions when the parent of a murdered son can forgive his killers, when a community can rise against the gangs that terrorize it and make it a better place, when we can rise above the petty arguments that spoil our human relationships are, for me, all a slice of the end times now. Some are dramatic world-changing occasions; others are small and apparently insignificant. Some affect whole nations and continents; others one or two individuals. The occasions may only be momentary and we quickly move back into the harsh reality of the everyday, but their effects linger, suggesting that new creation is possible and that transformation can happen.…
Belief in the resurrection is an act of rebellion against the evil, corruption and oppression that can so easily swamp us. Believing in the resurrection can be a refusal to accept the world as it is, that it can never change…. Believing in resurrection allows us to see the world with a long view, a perspective that looks backward to resurrection and forwards to the end times, recognizing traces of resurrection and end times in what is happening now. Believing in the resurrection can and should transform not only how we view the world, but how we live in it. We should become people in whom others can see new life, and people who introduce that new life wherever the world is stultifying and life-denying. Resurrection makes a difference not only to Jesus and the earliest disciples but also to us, as we live out our lives day by day. [2]
Reference:
[1] Paula Gooder, The Risen Existence: The Spirit of Easter (Fortress Press, 2015), 5.
[2] Gooder, The Risen Existence, 6, 7.
Image credit and inspiration: David Becker, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like a spring flower rising into golden light, Christ keeps unfolding into our world even now.
Story from Our Community:
The meditation helped me this morning: “Jesus’s own resurrected body speaks to the importance of lament in the midst of joy.” At the Easter Vigil in Marseille this year, amongst the joy of all the adults receiving baptism and the message of the Resurrection, we finished with the song “Resucitó.” Everybody danced with real joy. I sat and cried, sorrow and joy intertwined. We had sung “Resucitó” at our wedding, and also four years ago at my son’s funeral. I felt an invitation to continue living all our feelings to the fullest, even those which surprise us in their connection.
—Mary V.
