The end of the beginning; and the beginning
of the end. The burial of Jesus marks the end of one Age and the commencement
of another. Something decisive has occurred, indicating closure. Because of the
resurrection, the world as it was no longer is the world as it will be. The
contrast is between an incoming Age, marked by the character, ministry and
teachings of Jesus; and a passing Age, an Age that He confronted and challenged,
as it dominated over and sought to define the lives of men and women. His
resurrection marks the beginning of a new reality.
The resurrection is, critically, as important
as the death of Christ (1 Corinthians 15.3-4). The potency of the two
foci, Jesus Christ’s death and the Resurrection, are to be held together. The
Cross and death of Christ proclaim that atonement has been made, reconciling us
to God. The Resurrection makes the declaration that an outcome of this, in the
transformation of both people and the world around us, has broken in upon the
present. The physicality of Jesus’ body, taken from the tomb and reconstituted
through the powerful workings of the Holy Spirit as an enhanced physical body,
startlingly declares to us that the power of the New Heavens and the New Earth
has been released into the present dimension that we live in. The old laws of
death and decay, arising from the pandemic of sin, have been violated. A new
order has broken through, superimposed upon the old. It is the beginnings of
what is to come.
Because of this, the resurrection can be an
embarrassment. Where we feel a pressure to conform to the needs of society, to
bring a religious message that legitimises structures that are built on values
antithetical to the ways of God, then the Resurrection confounds us. The
Resurrection of Jesus Christ does not fit well with a religious agenda that
seeks to affirm the permanency of the structures and authorities that dominate
a world continuing to live by the old order. A message of forgiveness and
promise of a future life, beyond death, is tolerable: it does not disrupt the
status-quo of government and commerce within this present Age. But the message
of Resurrection violates the sanctity of the present order. It shows that the
revolutionary and disruptive values and objectives of Jesus Christ are those
that will last, that are vindicated by the rekindling of His life and the
transformation of His body. The resurrection calls us to inhabit dimensions
that bring together the reign of Heaven and the physicality of life on Earth.
Resurrection of Jesus Christ’s physical body
brings a new reality, superimposed upon this present Age, the invasion of the
Reign of God. It brings a taste of the New Heavens and New Earth to us now. The
resurrection of Jesus invites us to learn a new vocabulary, a new way of
speaking. A new way of seeing life and purpose. It invites us to look at the
world around us in a way that perceives its façade and its illusion of
permanency.
Part of that new vocabulary, as discussed in 2.5,
resides in the way we speak of faith. Faith has to be more than a subscription
to a statement, more than a bare basis of belief. Faith involves our enlistment
into carrying the presence of resurrection reality, a foretaste of it
experienced by us, to be attested to in and through our lives. Faith becomes
the drawing down of the presence of the New Heavens and New Earth, into the
physicality of the world we live in; even as Jesus Christ manifested the
presence of His resurrected body among us. Such faith involves a participation
in ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’ (Hebrews
11.1).
This faith, the faith of the non-conformist,
as we meet with it in Scripture and affirm it in our Declaration of Principle,
is a call to action. The declaration of resurrection reality, at the end of the
second part of our Declaration, leads into the dynamic commissioning of every
disciple – of those who have faith - that we find in the third part of our
Declaration. Such activism is a hallmark of baptistic faith. It is rooted in
the magnificent reality of our Lord’s physical, resurrected body, assuring us
that the reign of heaven has broken into this present world that we inhabit;
and that we can have the presence and power of Heaven with us now, as we live
out our lives.
