Raised Forever: Introduction

You’re in a garden. It’s early in the morning. And it’s still dark.

You see a young woman come into the garden (well, garden/graveyard) to pay her respects at the grave of a loved one. Graveyards aren’t convivial places at the best of times, but on this morning the woman finds something deeply disturbing. Her friend’s grave has been tampered with. The stone that blocked off the entrance to the tomb has been removed. Someone, it seems, has been in there before she arrived. Who knows, maybe that person is still here somewhere, hiding behind one of the other tombs? Creepy.

What would you be thinking? Someone has been here before. And they wanted to get into the grave. But why? Did they want to do something with (or to) the body? Why would someone want a dead body? Why so early in the morning? And why that particular dead body?

So she runs back to where her friends are staying. “They’ve taken the body!”, she tells them. “They’ve taken the body out of the tomb, and I don’t know where they have put him.” (To whom the ‘they’ in that sentence refers is unclear to everyone, including her.)

Two men start running toward the garden. The younger one gets there first, but he doesn’t go in. He looks in from the outside, and sees exactly what the woman had said—that there is no body inside. He can see from the entrance the strips of linen with which the body had been wrapped.

The older man arrives shortly after, but rather than stopping at the entrance, he runs straight in.

And he sees the same thing—an empty tomb. And he notices the linen has not just been left behind in a mess, but that the head-dress is separate from the linen that was around the body.

What sense do you make of a scene like that? The woman is right. The body is not there. Clearly someone has taken it. That’s the woman’s conclusion. This happened in about the year 33 AD, but people back then didn’t jump to supernatural conclusions willy-nilly. None of them see the empty tomb and think, “Miracle!” On the contrary, they, like us, conclude: if a dead body is not where you left it, a living person has done something to it. Dead bodies aren’t the subjects of verbs, but their objects. As a rule, they don’t do anything (except decompose). They can only have things done to them.

But that raises questions. Why has someone taken this body? And, if you are stealing a body for who knows what purposes, why strip the linen off first? How exactly does it make your job easy to ensure the body is naked prior to departure?

Jerusalem citizen: Hi Jerry, you’re up early. What are you doing?
Jerry the Grave Robber: Oh, nothing really. Just going for a walk. Lovely morning.
Jerusalem citizen: Jerry, is that a dead naked body you’ve got there?
Jerry: Um…

Furthermore, if you’re stealing a dead body early on a Sunday morning, my guess is that you feel a little, well, sheepish about the whole exercise. Like you’re doing something a bit out of the ordinary—something on which society might frown. Something you wouldn’t tell your mum about. So, if you’re that guy (the ‘who cares what mum and society thinks I’m getting me a dead naked body’ guy), how likely is it that you’re also a bit of a neat-freak? That you’re someone who has been raised to leave places neater than you found them so that you neatly fold and separate the grave clothes before you leave?

Grave robber 1: We’ve got the body. Let’s go!
Grave robber 2: Michael! We can’t just leave the place like this. This is disgusting! The least we can do is spend a few minutes cleaning up. Here, help me fold this linen.

* * *

Meanwhile, the woman is out in the garden crying. Probably not standard-issue ‘someone I love is dead’ tears, but a rather more complex and desperate stream of ‘my friend is dead and something really weird and possibly creepy has happened to his body’ tears.

A man comes up to her and asks her, “Why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?”

She thinks he’s the gardener and so she says, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away”.

And the gardener says to her, “Mary”.

And she exclaims, “Rabboni!”, which means, “my teacher”.

* * *

This, of course, is an account of the resurrection (or, if you prefer, alleged resurrection) of a Jewish Rabbi from the first century called Yeshua Ben Joseph, who is known to us as Jesus. It is from the Gospel of John. Three days earlier, Jesus had been crucified and laid in a tomb. And according to John, and to the early Christian witness in general, somewhere in the early hours of the first day of the week, on a day we call Sunday, in a month we call April, the tomb was found empty, and followers of Jesus soon after began reporting that they had seen him alive.

It’s a remarkable account, full of eyewitness-like details: the time of day, how the grave clothes were arranged, the names of the people involved and the order in which they arrived. For all sorts of reasons, it’s a report of events we are supposed to infer actually happened, in our world, and at a particular time and place. (Whether they did in fact happen or not we shall consider later in chapter 3. The point is that John wants to give the impression these things happened. He’s either writing history, or trying to give the impression of writing history. He’s not writing myth.)

* * *

This is a book about the resurrection.

It’s not a book (just) about the resurrection of Jesus. There are plenty of those from both sceptics and believers alike. Neither is it a book (just) about what happens when we die. Again, there are plenty of books about what happens when we die and how the world may or may not end.

This book is about what Paul was talking about when he preached to the Athenians about “Jesus and the resurrection” (Acts 17:18). It is about what Peter and John were talking about when they were preaching to the people of Jerusalem, “proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection from the dead” (Acts 4:2). It is about what the Apostles’ Creed means when it mentions both the resurrection of Jesus (“on the third day he rose again from the dead”) and the resurrection of us all (“I believe in the resurrection of the body”). That is, it is a book about what happened to Jesus, what will happen to us, and how those two things connect.

Now of course we must ask the ‘did it happen’ question. As John Updike says in his poem on the resurrection of Jesus:

Let us not mock God with metaphor…
making of the event a parable…
let us walk through the door.¹

The resurrection can’t mean what it means (either for Jesus or for us) if it didn’t actually happen. Not everything is like that. Some things (like Aesop’s Fables or some of Jesus’ own parables) can mean what they mean perfectly well apart from actually happening. But the resurrection of Jesus isn’t one of those things, for reasons we shall explore. We shall be walking through that door—the door of history—gladly and necessarily.

But the burden of this book is not to prove that Jesus’ resurrection happened. Why not? Because my observation is that most Christians have precisely no trouble accepting Jesus rose from the dead. This is not necessarily because we’ve all spent a lot of time surveying the data, but simply because we assume that believing in Jesus’ resurrection is part of the Christian package. (And anyway, if that is your particular itch, there are plenty of good books written to scratch exactly there.)² However, my observation is also that most Christians have precisely A Lot Of Trouble connecting what happened to Jesus with what will happen to us and to our world.

Let me put it this way: once you’ve ‘proved’ the resurrection of Jesus, what exactly have you proved? That Jesus is God? That he is the Son of God? That the cross worked? That there’s an afterlife? That a supernatural worldview is valid and evidence-based?

Actually, none of those are really where the New Testament goes when it talks about what the resurrection of Jesus means. But it goes somewhere. It has things—profound things—to say about what the resurrection of Jesus means. And, just as it is perfectly reasonable to expect a well-instructed Christian to be able to articulate what the cross achieved for us, I think it’s also perfectly reasonable for a well-instructed Christian to be able to articulate what the resurrection of Jesus means for us. That’s the purpose of this book.

* * *

So, here’s how we’ll proceed. Let’s start where most encounters with the resurrection start—with preaching. First, we’ll visit Athens and listen in as Paul proclaims the resurrection to sophisticated and sceptical pagans. Then, in chapter 2, let’s go to Jerusalem and listen in on Peter as he proclaimed the resurrection to a very different crowd: a group of deeply religious Jews at Pentecost. Then, in chapter 3, we return to that garden to ask the ‘what happened’ question, the ‘how could you know’ question, and the ‘how far can the evidence really get you’ question.

Then, in chapters 4 through to 7, we will be thinking deeply about the connections between what happened in that garden, what will happen to our bodies and to our world, and what difference it makes now.

I would be surprised if there weren’t some surprises in store for you. There certainly were for me. I’ve had to re-think the way I use the word ‘heaven’, clarify my beliefs about where those who’ve died as Christians are now, and re-evaluate my understanding of the true nature of Christian hope. It’s sometimes been disconcerting, but almost always thrilling, as I’ve discovered the Christian hope to be deeper, richer and more compelling than I ever did before. I hope the same thing happens for you.

* * *

But back to the garden. John has us focused on Mary alone. We know from the other Gospels that there were other women there. John knows it too—note the plural in John 20:2 when Mary says, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they have laid him”. John knows there were other women with Mary. And yet he wants us to have an image in our minds: the image of a man and a woman together in a garden. Why?

Man. Woman. Garden. Ring any bells? When is the last time in the Bible you saw a man and a woman in a garden?

Maybe John wants us to see that now, on this morning, in this garden, the new creation has begun.³

 

Buy the book nowAU storeUS store

---

<sup>1. J Updike, ‘Seven Stanzas at Easter’, in Telephone Poles and other Poems, Knopf, New York, 1963, pp. 72-3

2. I’ll refer to several of these books in chapter 3.

3. An insight suggested to me by Tom Wright’s comments on page 146 of John for Everyone (SPCK, London, 2002).</sup>