Wright: the overthrow of death

Saturday, May 2, 2015
    Feast of St. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, Teacher, 373
Meditation:
    [Peter:] “[Jesus] was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact.”
    —Acts 2:23-24 (NIV)
Quotation:
    To imply that Jesus “went to heaven when he died”, or that he is now simply a spiritual presence, and to suppose that such ideas exhaust the referential meaning of “Jesus was raised from the dead”, is to miss the point, to cut the nerve of the social, cultural and political critique. Death is the ultimate weapon of the tyrant; resurrection does not make a covenant with death, it overthrows it. The resurrection, in the full Jewish and early Christian sense, is the ultimate affirmation that creation matters, that embodied human beings matter.
    ... N. T. Wright (b. 1948), The Resurrection of the Son of God, Fortress Press, 2003, p. 730 (see the book)
    See also Acts 2:23-24; Matt. 17:22-23; Luke 9:22; 24:5-7; Acts 2:32; 3:15; 1 Cor. 15:17
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, You have created life anew. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
    search    script    mobile
sub    fb    twt    Jonah