Simply Jesus - Chapter 14 "Under New Management - Easter and Beyond"

Chapter 14 covers the resurrection, the ascension and enthronement, and the return of Jesus. As are all of the chapters of this book, this one is rich! (Wright bases all that he is saying here on the belief that Jesus did rise from the dead, so in this book he's not trying to present an argument for His rising.)

A New World
Wright says that the most important thing to know about the meaning of Jesus' resurrection is that "he rose as the beginning of the new world that Israel's God had always intended to make." The author points out that because of the western Platonic worldview, we western believers think of heaven as far away whereas in Scripture, "heaven" and "earth" overlap and interlock – the way ancient Jews believed that the Temple was where heaven and earth met. In the resurrection stories told by those who encountered Him, we're seeing the birth of a new creation in Jesus. "Jesus's risen person – body, mind, heart and soul – is the prototype of the new creation…we see him as the new creation in person."

Rembrandt's painting of the Resurrection

The message of the resurrection is NOT, "We're going to heaven now", or "There is life after death." No, the message of Easter is much bigger – it is what the placard on the cross said: Jesus is the King; and now God's new world, God's kingdom has begun in Him.

Ascension and Enthronement
The ascension of Jesus is about His enthronement as the One who is now in charge. (Again Wright urges the reader to push away the idea that heaven is distant and disconnected from earth.)
Wright underscores four things about the ascension (which I will briefly mention here):
1)  When Jesus ascended He did not disappear into a far distance (keeping in mind the Biblical worldview of heaven and earth overlapping).
2)  Heaven is the place from which the world is run.
3)  The ascension is the fulfillment of Daniel 7. Wright warns that we shouldn't expect to be able to put a story like this into "easy contemporary categories", and so he suggests that Luke's description in Acts 1:9 of the ascension is very likely intended "primarily to evoke that famous passage in Daniel 7:1."
4)  The ascension was Jesus radically upstaging Caesar and was now the new emperor; (the Roman world with its tradition about Julius Caesar's soul ascending to heaven and Augustus then becoming "the son of god" would have understood that Jesus was upstaging Caesar).

The Return of Jesus
The story of Jesus' resurrection and ascension was just the beginning of something new; none of the followers of Jesus in the early church supposed that this was fully accomplished. Where we presently are in God's big story is not the end. There will be a "royal appearing", like Caesar when he would return to Rome after visiting the colonies. His loyal citizens would go out to meet him and escort him in triumph back to the capital city.  (Wright warns about the popular idea in North American Christianity of a rapture in which Jesus will come down from "heaven" and His followers will fly up into the sky to be taken to heaven forever. Again this has platonic thinking behind it.)

"…to think of Jesus 'returning' is actually, as both Paul and John say…, to think of him presently invisible, but one day reappearing. It won't be the case that Jesus will simply reappear within the world the way it presently is. His return...will be the central feature of the much greater event itself: heaven and earth will one day come together and be present and transparent to each other. That's what they were made for, and that's what God will accomplish one day. It has, in fact, already been accomplished in the person of Jesus himself; and what God has done in Jesus, bringing heaven and earth together at immense cost and with immense joy, will be achieved in and for the whole cosmos at last…Eph. 1:10."

Jesus Today
The chapter concludes with a section about Pentecost. Between Jesus' ascension and His return/reappearing He has sent His own Spirit into the lives of His followers to be present in and with them, to direct them, and above all to enable them to make known who the world's true King and Lord is through witness and demonstration of kingdom realities.

Wright places the events of Pentecost in their larger story. "…the story line is not about the church discovering these gifts and simply enjoying them for their own sake. It is about the church living as a new community, giving allegiance to Jesus as Lord rather than to the kings and chief priests who rule the Jewish world or the emperor or magistrates who rule the non-Jewish world. 'We must obey God,' declares Peter, 'not human beings!' (Acts 5:29)

"The underlying issues in Acts - provoked by the Spirit - are about the things that come together in the Temple, namely, God and power. Who is the true God? Where is he now living? And, above all, who is now in charge? For the early Christians, the answer was, 'Jesus.'  'They're saying,' said their accusers in Thessalonica, 'that there is another king, Jesus!' (Acts 17:7) Well, precisely. That's what the whole story has been about.

"...Jesus is the Lord, but it's the crucified Jesus who is Lord - precisely because it's his crucifixion that has won the victory over all the other powers that think of themselves as in charge of the world...Jesus's death and his followers' suffering are the means by which his peace, freedom, and justice come to birth on earth as in heaven. Jesus's kingdom must come, then, by the means that correspond to the message. It's no good announcing love and peace if you make angry, violent war to achieve it!"

The sending of His Spirit to His followers is the power needed to live and walk out His victory in His way, the way of crucifixion (suffering, weakness, misunderstanding, persecution...)

Next week we will cover the final chapter, "Jesus: the Ruler of the World", in which Wright attempts to answer the question, "How does all this work out today?"