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On behalf of everyone at Bible Society – Happy Easter!
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What sort of human would want their body back, once it had started rotting in the ground?
That question was put forward by a gentleman named Celsus, a second-century Greek philosopher and Christianity’s first, known, pagan critic.
There are countless people like Celsus today. To them the resurrection is a crazy idea; possibly because some, like Celsus, mistake resurrection for a reassembly of the old body.
But when Jesus rose from the grave on Easter morning he hadn’t been reassembled. He’d been transformed.
Resurrection is a process that began with Jesus. Using an agricultural image, the apostle Paul calls him the first fruits of the resurrection: what God did for Christ, he’ll do for his followers. Notice, Paul is explaining this to fellow-believers in Corinth – a Greek city, where some church members had similar intellectual quibbles to Celsus, a century before Celsus.
The risen Jesus was the same, yet not the same. In 1 John 3, the writer says that when the Lord appears, those who belong to him will be like him: a transformed existence (verse 2).
As we saw yesterday, atonement is both personal and universal. Jesus died for your sins and mine, but above all he died to crush evil at large. Likewise, the resurrection message is not only good news for you and me as we witness our own gradual decline, but on a larger scale it is about God renewing and transforming the world.
So, what shall we do in the meantime? Put on the kettle, sit and wait for God’s Kingdom to arrive in fullness? Here’s what Scripture says: ‘Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain’ (1 Corinthians 15.58, NRSV).
Resurrection hope is alive and active. Happy Easter!
This reflection was written by Michael Pfundner, from the Publishing team at Bible Society.
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