60 Paisley Street, Victoria 3011, Australia
A rough guide to our location in Footscray, Melbourne
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60 Paisley Street, Victoria 3011, Australia A rough guide to our location in Footscray, Melbourne
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Pictures from the family camp at the Campaspe Downs country resort
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Christ’s Resurrection,
the New Creation Today, the first Sunday
after Easter, is a good time for us to look at a sentence in the Apostles’
Creed about the resurrection of Jesus. In
our Baptist churches we do not recite this Creed; from our beginnings we have
refused to be bound by the Creeds of the Church. This is not to say that we don’t see any value in them;
they are important statements about what the Church believes. But we have chosen to let the Scriptures be our starting
point and to be open to how the Scriptures, and also the teachings of the
Church, enable us to express the Faith afresh in every age. What does the Creed say
about Jesus following his death? It
says, “He descended into
hell. The third day he rose
again from the dead; he ascended into
heaven.” These three words - descended,
rose, ascended - make up a picture, and an old picture at that.
In biblical times the world was not described as we describe it.
So that we can understand what the Creed is saying about the resurrection
of Jesus, it may help if I give a brief explanation of the way these people
described the world. These ancients knew how to
write beautifully of what they saw around them; and they saw what we see: the
glittering sky on a moonlit night, threatening storms, the surging oceans, the
distant horizon, and the rising and setting sun. But they had no telescope or satellite to help them know
about the vast reaches of space, nor any way of measuring the depth of oceans,
nor navigational experience to suggest the earth is a globe moving in space.
So they wrote intelligently, but limitedly about what they saw: the earth
was flat, resting on some kind of foundation, and the sky was somehow suspended
above the earth. This way of imagining the
world affected the way they spoke and wrote about God, and about life and death.
God is above all in the heavens above the earth; all that opposes God is
far beneath the earth, as is the place of the dead, and in between is the world
we live in. They wrote more beautifully than that, but for our purposes
today we need only be aware of
their three-storied view of the world; . In addition to this way of
viewing the world, Judaism also tried to explain what happened to people after
they died and left the world. Judaism
was generally uncertain about the after-life and explained it as a place below
the earth called Sheol where all people went after death.
They thought the dead continued “to
exist in the underworld, a region of shadows, misery and futility; they lived on
as unreal, half-material shades in a land of silence and forgetting.” (A
Theological Word Book of the Bible, article on Hell).
It was only in the few centuries before Jesus that a fuller understanding
of life after death began to develop. With this as background, let
us consider the first of the three words about Jesus’ death and resurrection,
that “he descended into hell.” This
may not mean “hell” as in a place of punishment, but “hell” in the sense
of Sheol where all the dead were
thought to be. Perhaps this was
emphasising that this Jesus Christ who was crucified went like all others to the
place of the dead - he really died! But this statement suggests
much more than Jesus dying as all human beings die. Paul in his letter to the Colossians does not dismiss
the importance of Jesus’ death for the individual, but he does claim much more
than that; he claims that God, in the death of Jesus on the cross, “disarmed
the principalities and powers, and made a public example of them, triumphing
over them in him.” (Colossians 2:15). ‘Principalities
and powers’ probably means at least every human power, whether a company of
people or their institutions, that opposes God.
The religious establishment of chief priests, scribes and Pharisees which
called for the death of Jesus and the Roman rulers who did the execution
represented some of the ‘principalities and powers’ which opposed Jesus.
They went away satisfied that they were rid of this heretic. But Paul says that, although
Jesus was humiliated when he gave that terrifying cry of dereliction on the
cross as he experienced the absence of God and seemed to be the victim of the
principalities and powers, Jesus’
death was actually the humiliation of the principalities and powers
themselves! Jesus was dying a
shameful death but dying unjustly, and without calling for divine
intervention, and with forgiveness on his lips for those who had put him
there. That kind of death is
something which principalities and powers cannot understand.
That kind of death was so powerful that within three days God raised
Jesus from the dead. “He descended
into hell’ says the Creed. But
the Creed says also that after his resurrection, Jesus ‘ascended into
heaven.” We are here still in this ‘spatial’ way of looking at
things - descended into hell, ascended into heaven.
Here is a term completing the scope of Christ’s influence.
Having accomplished his role on earth, and in his descent into hell,
Jesus Christ was taken up to his place of authority ‘at God’s right hand’,
another powerful ancient image. The
Church worships him as ruler of all. I
will leave this ascended part of the statement there, perhaps for another
time. I come now to the central
act of this description of Jesus: “The third day (Jesus) rose again
from the dead.” This is not the
same as the raising of Lazarus who apparently was really dead but was
raised again by Jesus only to die sometime in the future.
The accounts in the New Testament of the resurrection of Jesus - his
coming to his disciples, his appearing on the Damascus Road to Paul, the
astonishing effect he had on the early Christians as recorded in the Acts of the
Apostles, and Paul’s own reflections in 1 Corinthians 15 on the resurrection -
all these suggest that this resurrection was a new thing and has changed
forever the balance of power in human life from despair to hope. We are here talking about
the beginning of a new era in human history and human destiny.
God took note of Jesus whom God sent into a world as threatening as the
one which pressures you. God took note of the hatred mounted against Jesus and watched
Jesus being engulfed gradually by injustice, torture and death.
God heard Jesus’ cry of dereliction from the cross, “My God, why have
you forsaken me?” and God’s heart broke for him.
This was not a piece of theatre in which Jesus, like an actor on stage
who is not really dead but is back to normal after the curtain falls, and will
be back to do it all again the next night. To take the old image from
John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian’s death is described
like this: he was crossing the river into the Celestial City - “and his
feet lost the bottom of the river and he was born across to the other
side.” Jesus lost his hold on
life too; he really died; he was ‘crucified, dead and buried.” But after that, this
new thing happened. When they could
not find the body of Jesus in the tomb, they discovered that he was among them.
Yet they could not ‘capture’ that presence, tie him down, as it were.
He came to them in various ways. He
had all the characteristics of Paul’s 1 Corinthians, ‘imperishable’,
‘powerful’, glorious ‘spiritual body’. The resurrection of Jesus was not
a temporary escape from death like Lazarus who had one more funeral to go!
God’s act in raising Jesus from the dead was as great an act of power
as was God’s creation of the world. The
Jesus they knew was among them again in the new creation of God. I invite you today to open
your life to this reality. Your
life is open to other realities: the pressures you are under at work, in
your family, in your relationships: they occupy your thoughts, emotions and
energies almost every waking minute; the pressures you are under from
life in this city, state and nation: the suffering of the unemployed; the
horrific consequences of drugs upon the our young; the shame of sexual
exploitation of children; and the lies and injustices which are condoned by some
people in authority; the pressures you feel from world tragedies of war,
poverty, and natural disasters. But
open as you are to these realities, I invite you to open your life to this
reality of the resurrection of Jesus. |
