Resurrection Hope

'Resurrection' does not mean 'going to heaven when you die'. It isn't about 'life after death'. It's about life after 'life after death'. You die; you go to be 'with Christ' ('life after death'), but your body remains dead. Describing where and what you are in that interim period is difficult, and the New Testament writers mostly don't try. Call it 'heaven' if you like, but don't imagine it's the end of all things. What is promised after that interim period is a new bodily life within God's new world (life after life after death).

I am constantly amazed that many contemporary Christians find this confusing. It was second nature to the early church and to many subsequent Christian generations. It was what they believed and taught. If we have grown up believing and teaching something else, it's time we rubbed our eyes and read our texts again. God's plan is not to abandon this world, the world of which he said that it was 'very good'. He intends to remake it. And when he does, he will raise all his people to new bodily life to live in it. That is the promise of the Christian gospel.

To live in it, yes; and also to rule over it. There is a mystery here which few today have even begun to ponder. Both Paul and Revelation stress that in God's new world those who belong to the Messiah will be placed in charge. The first creation was put into the care of God's image-bearing creatures. The new creation will be put into the care, the wise, healing stewardship of those who have been 'renewed according to the image of the creator', as Paul puts it.

In God's new world, of course, Jesus himself will be the central figure. That's why from the beginning the church has always spoken of his 'second coming', though in terms of the overlap of heaven and earth it would be more appropriate to speak, as some early Christians also did, of the 'reappearing' of Jesus. He is, at the moment, present with us, but hidden behind that invisible veil that keeps heaven and earth apart, and which we pierce in those moments, such as prayer, the sacraments, the reading of scripture and our work with the poor, where the veil seems particularly thin. But one day the veil will be lifted; earth and heaven will be one; Jesus will be personally present, and every knee shall bow at his name; creation will be renewed; the dead will be raised; and God's new world will at last be in place, full of new prospects and possibilities. This is what the Christian vision of salvation…. is all about.

Tom Wright in 'Simply Christian'