From the Salmon

Well, my church may not have had MC Hammer this Easter, but I still somehow managed to be inspired by our service. Over the past few months, I’ve been learning more and reading more about the idea of the Kingdom of God and the ramifications that idea has for the world we live in, the church, and our lives. As a result, I think I saw Easter in a different way this year.

I don’t remember the suburban evangelical churches of my childhood having that much to say about the Kingdom of God. Maybe I just missed it, but I seem to remember Easter as being a corporate celebration of a fairly individual result of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Jesus died for me. For you. For each one of us. So that if I believe the right things and try to live a repentant, changed life, Jesus has made it possible for me to live in God’s presence forever. Or something like that. I don’t say this to belittle that view of the resurrection in any way. On the whole, I still believe all of those things are true. And they are huge, powerful redemptive concepts. But I’m beginning to wonder if they’re huge enough.

In his sermon today, our pastor quoted an article that N.T. Wright wrote for The Independent last Easter:

Easter is about the beginning of God’s new world. John’s Gospel stresses that Easter Day is the first day of the new week: not so much the end of the old story as the launch of the new one. The gospel resurrection stories end, not with “well, that’s all right then”, nor with “Jesus is risen, therefore we will rise too”, but with “God’s new world has begun, therefore we’ve got a job to do, and God’s Spirit to help us do it”. That job is to plant the flags of resurrection — new life, new communities, new churches, new faith, new hope, new practical love — in amongst the tired slogans of idolatrous modernity and destructive postmodernity.

As I’ve wrestled with the largely Reformed theology of the churches that I grew up in, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with the doctrine of salvation by “faith alone.” Actually, I don’t think it’s so much the doctrine itself as it is what the doctrine has done to our discussion of what the Christian life should look like. The fact that “salvation by works” is anathema to Reformed theology often cripples our ability to talk seriously about an idea like “we’ve got a job to do,” because saying we have to do something sounds suspiciously like “works.” I’ve come across this hesitancy an awful lot. And as a result, I think we are content to be concerned only with what we believe and what others believe. And in this contentedness, we miss out on something bigger.

God’s new world has begun, therefore we’ve got a job to do, and God’s Spirit to help us do it.

I’m starting to see that Easter is about God’s desire to restore all of His creation, not just about His desire to save individual human beings. And this redemption is not just something that did happen with Jesus’ resurrection or will happen when Jesus returns, but it is also something that is currently taking place.

I’ve just started reading Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy. And because I’m only about 100 pages in, I don’t want to pretend to understand the full scope of his book. But in an early chapter, Willard writes about how, in the Christian story, God created us to be stewards of creation, ruling alongside Him. We rejected this collaborative rule, but God now invites us to come alongside Him once again in healing the brokenness that resulted from that rejection. This, in part, was the relationship that Jesus heralded as the coming of the Kingdom of God. And it seems to me that this is bigger than just my salvation or yours.

This Easter, I’m still learning what this Kingdom work looks like — what Wright means when he says our job is to “plant the flags of resurrection.” I’ll most likely still be at it next Easter and for many Easters to come. And I’m not sure what my place is in this work yet. For now, I pray as we did in church today:

Forgive us, God of mercy. Help us to live in light of the resurrection, knowing that your commitment to us and to this world is to renew and remake all things. We thank you that this new creation has begun in Jesus Christ, the risen Lord. Amen.

Happy Easter.