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Meet Father KempEaster Sunday – 4 April 2010
What is the difference between a consultant, a lawyer and a theologian? A consultant borrows your watch and tells you the time. A lawyer borrows your watch, tells you the time, and keeps the watch as part payment of the fee. A theologian tells you the time, and suggests you adjust your watch.[1] It is my duty this Easter to tell you to adjust your watch because Jesus’ resurrection has stopped the ebb and flow of time. Jesus’ resurrection was the beginning of the new world or as Scripture spoke of it, the Age to Come. The Age to Come, the age in which we live, has many different names in Scripture, some of which are: the last days, the reign of God (Isa 52:7), the new heavens and earth (Isa 65:17), the covenant of peace (Eze 34:25), and the new covenant (Jer. 31:31). To understand the meaning of the Age to Come and these other terms, we must look at the eschatology of Scripture starting with the Old Testament. Eschatology is a fancy word meaning “the study of the last things.” The Old Testament writers believed that there were two stages of history, the present age and the age to come. They believed that they were living in the present age, an age dominated by Israel’s sin, rebellion and ultimately Israel’s exile. Israel’s exile occurred in two stages. The first stage occurred when the Assyrians defeated the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 bc and the second stage occurred when the Babylonians defeated the southern kingdom of Judah in 586 bc. Before and during Israel’s exile, God’s prophets spoke of the Age to Come, the age when God would restore Israel to her land and bestow upon Israel great blessings such as peace, prosperity and world domination.[2] Furthermore, the prophets foretold that Israel’s messiah would inaugurate the Age to Come by bringing an end to Israel’s exile and establishing God’s kingdom over the earth. Finally and most importantly for today, the Age to Come would officially begin when God acted to resurrect his people. God is a just God who will reward his people and punish His enemies. In the present age justice is illusive thus for God to be just, He must resurrect all people to justly punish his enemies and reward His people. The three things we should remember are 1) when the Age to Come arrived, Israel’s exile would be ended 2) by her Messiah 3) the sign indicated Messiah’s victory would the resurrection from the dead. Jesus’ resurrection revealed that he, as the Messiah had ended Israel’s exile by defeating sin and death and thus inaugurated the Age to Come. The world we imagine, the world we dream of, a world with no famine, no pestilence, no war, no persecution, no hunger, no poverty, no injustice, no earthquakes and no tsunamis is the world of the age to come and this age began when Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. Therefore, since Jesus’ resurrection, time has stopped and timeless eternity has begun.
However as we know all too well, time has also continued, our watches keep ticking. There is still famine, there are still wars, people still die of starvation while others die of gluttony, the earth trembles and shakes killing thousands of people and God’s beloved people experience great persecution. While the Age to Come has arrived with Jesus’ resurrection, we, just as Israel’s prophet’s before us, still live in this present age. This brings us to the eschatology of the New Testament, an eschatology that states we now live in both the present age and the Age to Come. What God had promised to do at the end of time for all His people, He has done at the middle of time to Jesus our representative. Thus, as someone has rightly said, “[We live] between the End (Mark One) and the End (Mark two). …We are living in the first days after the great act of God within history to defeat sin and death and liberate the whole cosmos…[and] the last days before the great act of God which will bring to completion that which was begun in Christ.”[3] We are living in an historical anomaly, a time unforeseen by any prophet, a time when we are both living in this present age and in the age to come, which is to say that we are simultaneously living in the present and the future. Time has stopped, but our watches still keep ticking.
What does this mean? What does it mean to live with one foot in the present and one foot in the future? I would like to suggest two applications found in the writings of St. Paul. The first application is the confrontation of Jesus’ resurrection with ancient paganism, a paganism that resembles our modern culture. In his book On the Nature of the Gods, Cicero said that there were three philosophical options available for the Romans. They could be Stoics and be pantheists believing that everything is divine. This is quite similar to most current New Age belief. To the Stoic and New Agers of today, Paul would have agreed that the world is a place of God’s beauty and power. However, the world is not divine, Jesus’ resurrection was not a simple resuscitation of the body, it was a transformation of the body. The world as we know it is only the seeds for what is to come. Thus, the resurrection of Jesus reveals that while the material world is good, it needs some work, it needs to undergo the transformation of resurrection. The second option was to be an Epicurean and believe that gods may exist but if they do they are not concerned with our world. This is similar to the popular modern belief we call Deism. To the Epicurean and the Deist of today, Paul would have agreed that God was different from the world and cannot be identified or confused with the world. However, God is not distant and he is concerned about his creation. Through his son, God became a man and at Jesus’ resurrection, God the Son permanently and eternally took upon himself a fleshly and material body revealing God’s great love for the created material world.[4] The resurrection of Jesus reveals that the material world, including our bodies, should not be rejected or abused. The third and final was to be a Skeptic (as Cicero himself was) and believe there cannot be any knowledge of the divine so why not keep the old traditions and practices going in the hopes that society would some how hold together. This is similar to modern skeptics and agnostics who, in theory, neither believe nor reject anything. To the ancient and modern skeptic, Paul agreed saying that the stories of the pagan pantheon are indeed laughable, but, as someone has said, “one can know for sure about the one true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, …because he has revealed himself to all in raising Jesus from the dead…”[5] The resurrection of Jesus reveals to everyone, Jew or Greek, that God can be known and known through the person of Jesus.
Finally, the resurrection of Jesus is God’s assurance that the world and our lives are not the chaotic rumblings of chance. Listen to what N.T. Wright said about Jesus resurrection: [God] has given assurance to all by raising [Jesus] from the dead. The facts about Jesus of Nazareth, and especially about his resurrection from the dead, are the foundation of the assurance that the world is not random. It is not ultimately a chaos; that when we do justice in the present we are not whistling in the dark, trying to shore up a building that will ultimately collapse,… When God raised Jesus from the dead, that was the microcosmic event in which the ultimate macrocosmic act of judgment was contained in a nutshell, as a seed, the seed, of the ultimate hope. God declared, in the most powerful way imaginable, that Jesus of Nazareth really was the Messiah, the shoot from the stump of Jesse, the one upon whom rested the spirit of wisdom and understanding, counsel and might, knowledge and the fear of the Lord. In the greatest irony of history, he himself underwent cruel and unjust judgment, coming to the place which symbolized and drew together all the myriad cruelties and injustices of history, to bear that chaos, that darkness, that cruelty, that injustice, in himself, and to exhaust its power.”[6] The powers of this world, the powers that rage around us, have been defeated by Jesus because he fought them till death on Good Friday, he exhausted their power on Holy Saturday and on Easter Sunday he permanently defeated them by rising from the dead. The chaos, despair, cruelty and injustice we both experience and to often perpetuate, are the last desperate attacks of an enemy who has been caged and defeated. That is why Peter (I Peter 1:6), James (James 1:1, 2) and Paul (Romans 5:1-5) exhort Christians to rejoice at their sufferings and trials and consider them joyful because they are not permanent, they are the last gasps of a dying dragon. Jesus’ resurrection has inaugurated the Age to Come and all history is now purposely moving toward that end. What God the Father began at Jesus’ resurrection he will one day accomplish not just in our bodies but also in the cosmos. Therefore, time has indeed stopped and the hour, minute and second hand simultaneously point back to the Jesus’ resurrection and forward to what God will one day finish. It is time for us to adjust our watches.
[1] N.T. Wright, Full of the Knowledge of the Lord, http://www.ntwrightpage.com/sermons/CourtService09.htm
[2] One such prophecy is Isaiah 11:
The wolf shall live with the lamb
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain;
for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea.
Concerning this passage, N.T. Wright has said, “Imagine a beautiful, finely made silver goblet. There it stands on a shelf, a thing of beauty to be admired. Now imagine that same goblet filled with the finest red wine. … Now imagine that we are actually in a service of Holy Communion, and this fine wine is actually conveying to us the lifeblood of our blessed Lord Jesus himself. The silver goblet is still as beautiful as ever it was. But now it is filled with something which transforms it, which makes it a vessel of something beyond itself yet utterly appropriate to itself. In the same way, declares the prophet, this whole creation, this wonderful world, is like a beautiful silver goblet, destined to be filled, flooded to overflowing, with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea, flooding in to every harbour and inlet at the fullest of tides.” N.T. Wright, Ibid.
[3] N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said, pgs 51, 141.
[4] Pg. 92.
[5] Ibid, pg 92. Wright sentence continues, “and in establishing through the Spirit of Jesus a family in which all humans are equally welcome, a family destined to inherit the world.”
[6] http://www.ntwrightpage.com/sermons/CourtService09.htm
