A Post-Easter Reflection Post

I’ve been listening to (and really enjoying) N.T. Wright’s 2004 lectures on “The Future of the People of God.” All of the audio of those talks is available as free downloads from Andrew Perriman’s Open Source Theology site. I’ve listened to this particular section of Wright discussing the Cross, the Resurrection, and Easter several times, and I wanted to transcribe it here for others to read and reflect on with me:

“The question faced by Jews in the 1st Century was, ‘What’s it gonna be like be when God comes back?’ because nowhere in second temple literature does it say that the God who abandoned the Temple, a la Ezekiel chapter 9 and so on, has actually returned. Malachi, in the post-exilic period, says he will come back, but nowhere does it say he has come back. …

“So when Jesus comes to Jerusalem on his last fateful journey, he is actually acting out the return of Yahweh to Zion. … You have to hold all that Old Testament stuff in your head and say, ‘That’s what was going on. It didn’t look like they thought it would, but this was God’s way of doing what he’d always promised.’ …

“If you were to come to it completely fresh not knowing what it was about, the Passion narrative in all four Gospels would say to you, ‘This is a political story. This is not first and foremost a theological story.’ So many Christians, so many in our churches, have read the Passion narrative as atonement theology put into a loose historical context. That’s not what the narrative is about. It’s about how the living God took flesh and engaged with the multi-layered empire of his day and suffered the inevitable consequences. And you find the theology inside that political story, not super-imposed on it or loosely joined with it. You get to the theology by wrestling with the political story. …

“[And] you find the personal within the theological. It’s like a Russian doll: The big story is about God and the world, and the world means Caesar and Pilot and Caiaphas and all the rest of them and how the living God in the vulnerable person of Jesus comes into the middle of that and gets crucified. And inside that you discover the theology: This is what the story of Israel was always about—to redeem the world. …

“The Gospel stories have woven in ways in which we can see how this plays out for individuals—the women who are weeping, Joseph of Aramathea doing what he could, et cetera—the way in which our individual stories are woven into the theological story, which is itself the deeper meaning of the political story. God help us that we have divided what Scripture had put all as one! We need to learn to re-read the narrative, because it’s within that large narrative that atonement thoelogy and political thoelogy belong together and together generate an eccelesiology … which is rooted in the one-off achievement of Jesus but which goes out in the form of a church that stands before the world like Jesus standing before Pilate … as Jesus stands before Pilate and Pilate asks him that wonderful postmodern question, ‘What is truth?’ and Jesus can’t answer it because he is the Truth, John’s already told us that five chapters earlier. The only answer Jesus can make to Pilate’s question is to take upon himself the wrath of Rome which is the wrath of God that it may be finished and dealt with in order that God’s new creation may now be. …

“Easter is about the renewal of creation, the renewal of the kosmos into which we are introduced like the disciples trembling and frightened and not knowing what the dickens is going on. … God forgive us that we’ve belittled Easter.”

Here’s some more N.T. Wright/Easter link-love (happy reading!):

• Easter and Embryo Cloning by Mike Moses
• The meaning of the gospel: Surprised by Hope (and an announcement about N.T. Wright’s new book Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision) by Byron Borger
• The resurrection from the dead by Andrew Perriman
• Good Friday by Julie Clawson

Photo by frangipani photograph

Posted on 04-14-2009