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Easter in Eden?

March  23, 2008  - Dale

Easter - the season of new life. The season of a spiritual Spring where life erupts again after the winter of death. Fair descriptions of Easter do you think?

Certainly Easter is connected with the creation. It is about the most dramatic and most terrible thing that has ever happened to the creation. It is about death. At least it is about undoing death. Or is it?

Much modern discussion suggests that people do not want to undo death. They just want to continue to exist in some form or other. As long as life continues… that is the main thing.  Greek myths and various images from the Bible can build a picture of a pleasant sort of life after death, that in a sense ignores death and leaves it behind.

So in a way death is denied. It is regarded as a door to something else, a transition to some kind of spiritual existence in the presence of God. Such thinking fits with a view of life that downplays the importance of the physical and emphasises the superiority of the spiritual – common Christian themes in recent times.

Unfortunately this view does not do justice to the Bible, or to the resurrection of Jesus. The problem with death is that it concerns bodies. We humans never were merely spirits or “souls”. We are embodied beings. That is how God made us. There is nothing in the Christian faith that corresponds to the ideas of other religions that the body is bad and needs to be escaped from.

God’s problem is what to do with an embodied race that dies. He rejected the “live forever” solution back at the beginning, choosing death for them instead. And it is this death that gives us the clue to the solution. The answer is to create again. To take the dead bodies and make them over again.

Resurrection means making dead bodies alive – but in such a form that this time they will never die. It is this resurrection that makes possible the completion of God’s original purpose for his creation – and not only for the human part of it.

Now the prototypical resurrection has already taken place. The resurrection of Jesus is both the first of many and the means by which the others will happen. A real human being has been taken to death and raised to a new life, not brought back to the old life, but raised to a bodily life that can be lived in the new creation without ever dying.

Jesus is the evidence for resurrection life. And resurrection is at the heart of what Christianity proclaims. No resurrection, no Christianity. Easter is not like a cyclical Spring. It is a new creation.

Dale

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