The last time I wrote I talked about hope. That human beings are through-and-through creatures of hope. That there is almost nothing we cant bear so long as we have hope, and there is not much we can bear without it.

That Christian faith is nothing if not about hope. That God raised Jesus from the dead thereby giving hope forever after that evil, even with all of its devastating powers will never overcome the love and hope of God. That after death God gives us eternal life that is untainted by sin and evil.

Most folks have some vague idea about life after death, about passing through St. Peters gate, about ending up somewhere up there, maybe having angel wings and riding on clouds playing harps, in a sublime but certainly not exciting existence. Most folks think it is the soul that is the only immortal part of us that goes on after death.

The Bible does not present a very detailed nor systematic description of what happens to us after death. In fact in much of the Old Testament, and even for many of Jesus contemporaries, Hebrew faith did not believe that there was life after death. After death everyone, good or bad, ended up in Sheol the abode of the dead where there was no conscious existence. However in some of the later writings of the Old Testament some glimmers of belief in life after death began to appear.

Life after death is assumed and proclaimed in the New Testament. But the immortality of the soul is not. Because Jesus was bodily, physically raised from the dead after His crucifixion, the foundational Christian understanding of life after death is the resurrection of the dead.

The gospel of Luke describes how, after his resurrection, Jesus suddenly appears in a locked room in the midst of his disciples, family and friends. They are terrified and think they are seeing a ghost. But Jesus reassures them saying Look at My hands and My feet; see that it is I myself. Touch Me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have Have you anything here to eat? They gave Him a piece of broiled fish, and He took it and ate in their presence. (Luke 24:39-43)

(Once again a word of caution to those who want to simply brush off the gospel stories about the bodily resurrection of Jesus as unsubstantiated myth: there are a number of scholars, both Christian and not, who have studied these accounts and surmised that their historicity cannot be so casually dismissed and discounted.)

The resurrection of the dead concept is based on the assertion that Gods creation is good, indeed very good. Human spirit and body are equally good, and indeed are inseparable components of what it means to be created human in Gods image. Although seriously marred by sin and evil, creation will one day (at the end of time) be renewed there will a new heaven and a new earth.

Thus Jesus is raised from the dead in both spirit and body. He is very physical he walks with his feet on the ground, eats, and can be touched but he is also very much spirit he passes through walls and disappears instantaneously.

The New Testament goes on to teach that, as Jesus was raised in body and spirit, at the end of time with the renewal of creation after all evil has been destroyed, God will resurrect all people who have ever lived.

Share new life

Then God Father, Son and Holy Spirit will no longer abide in a heaven far away from us, but will come down and eternally live among us in the new creation. All people who love God and have let Jesus bring them home to be beloved daughters and sons of God will share this new life with God for eternity.

And it will be both physically and spiritually real. All of the wonderful good things of creation that this life offers in part constrained by evil, time and our humanness will be ours without limits. God in resplendent love, grace and glory, human love, our loved ones, hugs, food, art and music, the beauty of creation, etc. will be ours for ever and ever. Our existence will be walking-with-our-feet-on-the-ground real.

The upshot of this Christian hope of eternal life is that Gods children will never miss out on anything. Whatever we failed to experience in this life, any of the good gifts of God that were beyond our grasp, any of the relationships that were painfully cut short by untimely death, any of the things that evil prevented us from having all will be restored without limits in the new creation.

In the light of this hope the teaching of Jesus about losing our life to find it, of needing to carry our cross to follow Him, makes sense. Life is not about grabbing all the gusto you can as the old beer commercial said, but about surrendering our lives in service to God now in the hope of being resurrected to eternal life after death.

I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the sharing of His sufferings by becoming like Him in His death. (Philippians 3:10)

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Reflections: Resurrection hope - Wellington Advertiser