The resurrection of the Son of God changed the course of
history like no other event before or since.
Think about it. The life of Jesus was quite remarkable, but
he never traveled far nor reached a lot of people. When he has put to death on a cross, a
spectacularly cruel death, it is certain that everyone watching thought that
that was the end of it: another would-be messiah had failed.
No one was expecting what happened on that first Easter
morning. Not only was the tomb empty,
but Jesus, who had indeed been very dead on Friday and Saturday, was alive,
seen alive, the same Jesus, alive in the flesh, yet somehow different.
That resurrection made such an impression, on people that
the band of followers were able to proclaim with confidence that the risen
Jesus was Lord, King of the new Kingdom.
Bishop N. T. Wright has written a massive 738-page book called
“The Resurrection of the Son of God”. He
looks at the event from all angles, from the way people at that time looked
resurrection, if they believed it at all, which most didn’t - until this one;
and they way resurrection was viewed after this special one, from the
historical accounts surrounding the event, not just the accounts in the Bible,
but what other contemporary historians and scholars had to say, and also he looked at it from the
perspective of a Biblical scholar.
Wright (page 730): “Death is the ultimate weapon of the
tyrant; resurrection does not make a covenant with death, it overthrows it. The resurrection in the full Jewish and early
Christian sense is the ultimate affirmation that creation matters, that
embodied human beings matter.”
(Page 731):“The resurrection constitutes Jesus as the world’s
true sovereign, the ‘son of god’ who claims absolute allegiance from everyone
and everything within creation. He is
the start of the creator’s new world: its pilot project, indeed its pilot.”
In Wright’s book “Simply Jesus” on page 191: “When Jesus
rose from the dead on Easter morning, he rose as the beginning of the new world
that Israel’s God had always intended to make.
That is the first and most important thing to know about Easter.”
In his book “Surprised by Hope”, Wright has a whole
chapter: “Reshaping the Church for
Mission: Living the Future”. He tries to
get us excited about Easter: “Easter is about the wild delight of God’s
creative power . . . It’s about the real Jesus coming out of the real tomb and
getting God’s real new creation under way . . . This is our greatest festival .
. . This is our greatest day.”
