162. on the Third Day

7/30/2019 162. on the Third Day

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God's promise fulfilled

On the third dayby N. T. Wright

AMONG THE FIRST mean ing s that the resu rre cti on

opened up to the surprised disciples was that Is

rael's hope had been fulfilled. The promised time

had come, as Jesus himself had announ ced duri ng

his public career; but it looked very different from what

they had imagined. The eschaton had arrived. The long

narrative of Israel's history had reached its climax.

* "Resurrection" was a key part of

w the eschaton. Ifit had happened to

S one man whom many had regarded

w as Israels messiah, that meant thatO

7

M it had happened, in principle, to Is-

3 rael as a whol e. Th e messiah r epr e

s se nt ed Isra el, just as David had

represented Israel when he faced

Goliath. Jesus had been executed

as a messianic pretender, as "king

of the Jews," and Israels God had

vindicated him. This, apparently,

was how Isr ael s God was fulfilling

his promises to Israel. Again andagain the early Christians empha

sized tha t Jesus was raised from th e

dead by God, and they meant Is-

rael's God, YHWH. They saw the

resurrection as a life-giving act of

the covenant God, the creator who

had always had the power to kill

and make alive. The resurrection

was the sign to the early Christians

that this living God had acted at last

in accordance with his ancient

promise, and had thereby shownhimself to be God, the unique cre

ator and sovereign of the world.

The resurrection therefore con

stituted Jesus as messiah, as "son of

God" in the Davidic sense of 2

Samuel 7 or Psalm 2 (texts upon which the early Christians

drew to explain and expound their belief). "Davidic" psalms

were ransacked for hints about the resurrection ofDavid's

coming son. We can watch this process in Acts, with Luke

24 as its programmatic basis, and we can see exactly the

same in Paul. The entire argument of Romans is framed be

tween two great statements ofthis theme. In between, atone of the letter's most climactic moments, those who share

HE IS RISEN: Resurrection ofChrist, by

Hans Pleydenwurff (c. 1425-1472), is in the

Alte Pinakothek in Munich, Germany.

the "sonship" of the messiah will share as well the "inhe

tance" spoken ofin Psalm 2. The resurrection means th

Jesus is the messianic "son of God," that I srael s eschatolo

ical hope has been fulfilled; that it is time for the nations

the world to be brought into submission to Israel's God.

The resurrection, interpreted in this sense, set the ear

Christians on a course ofconfrontation, not to say col

sion, with other Jewish groups o

their day. Any claim that Israe

God had acted here rather th

somewhere else within Judais

(the temple, for example), vind

cating a man whose work an

teaching had been highly contr

versial, was bound to create

storm. Resurrection always ha

been a novel, revolutionary do

t r ine, and this new moveme

proved their worst fears about it

be true. "They were angry that th

disciples were announcing, i

Jesus, the resurrection from th

dead."

With good reason. Th e an

nouncement meant the inaugur

tion of the new covenant. Jesus' fo

lowers really did believe that Isra

was being renewed through Jesu

and that his resurrection, markin

him out as messiah, was a call to I

rael to find a new identity in follow

ing him and establishing his kin

dom. Their belief in the resurrect ioof the son ofGod, in this sens

marked out the early Christia

from those of their fellow Jews wh

could not or would not accept such

thing. And it marked t hem out not

non-Jews or anti-Jews, not as some kind of pagan group, b

precisely as people wh o claimed that the t ruest an d most ce

N. T. Wright, canon theologian atWestminster Abbey, was r

cently named bishop ofDurham. This article is excerpte

from The Resurrection of the Son of God (the third volum

in his series "Christian Origins and the Question ofGodpublished this spring by Fortress.


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tral hopes and beliefs of Israel had come true, and that theywere living by them. To claim the risen Jesus as son of God inthe sense of messiah was the most deeply Jewish thing theChristians could do, and hence the most deeply suspect in theeyes of those Jews who did not share their convictions.

The "new covenant" beliefs ofthe early Christiansmeant that, in hailing Jesus as son of God, they believedthat Israels God had acted in him to fulfill the covenantpromises by dealing at last with the prob lem of evil. Onestandard Jewish analysis of evil did not hold that the cre

ated order was itself evil, but that human beings, by committing idolatry, distor ted the ir own humanity into sinfulbehavior and courted corruption and ultimately death.Deaththe unmaking ofthe creator's image-bearingcreatureswas seen not as a good thing, but as an enemyto be defeated. It was the ultimate weapon ofdestruction: anticreation, antihuman, anti-God. Ifthe creatorGod was also the covenant God, and if the covenant wasthere to deal with the unwelcome problem that had invaded the created order at its heart and corrup ted humanbeings themselves, it was this intruder, death itself, thathad to be defeated. To allow death to have its wayto

sign up, as it were, to some kind of compromise agreement whereby death took human bodies but the creatorwas allowed to keep human soulswas no solution, atleast not to the problem as it was perceived within mostof Second Temple Judaism. That is why resurrection wasnever a redescription ofdeath, but always its defeat.

therefore be summarized as follows: Jesus is Israels messiah. In him, the creators covenant plan to deal with the siand death that has so radically infected his world hareached its long-awaited and decisive fulfillment.

A second level of understanding the resurrection has tdo with claims to leadership. Ifthe phrase "son ofGodcould mean "messiah" to a first-century Jewish ear, it had significantly different sense in the world of early Christianity, where it was applied to pagan monarchs and toCaesar in particular. Not that the early Christians chos

the phrase "son of God" on the basis of this pagan usageBut there can be no question that many in the GrecoRoman world considered the title a challenge to CaesarAnd there is no question that some of the early writers, including Paul, intended it in this way. The long line of Jewish thought that ran from the stories ofDavid andSolomon, through the psalms to books like Isaiah anDaniel, and then into the flourishing literature of the lateSecond Temple period, saw Israels true king as the worldtrue lord. The early Christians, precisely because they regarded Jesus as Israels messiah, also regarded him as thtrue monarch of the gentile world.

Calling Jesus "son ofGod" within this wider circle omeaning constituted a refusal to retreat, a determinationto stop Christian discipleship from turning into a privatcult, a sect, a mystery religion. It launched a claim on thworlda claim at once absurd (a tiny group of nobodie

W;

'ITHIN THE New Testamentthis perspective is most clearly articulated by Paul, especially in Romans 8 and the

Corinthian correspondence, and in Revelation. In the most obvious passage, 1Corinthians 15:20-28, we find an explicitly messianic theology, rooted in mes-sianically read psalms, in which Jesus, asthe son of God, is the agent of the creatorGod in accomplishing precisely this taskof ridding the world of evil and of death.As far as Paul was concerned, this was thedefeat of death. The early Christians sawJesus' resurrection as the act of thecovenant God fulfilling his promises to

deal with evil at last. Declaring their faithin his resurrection was a self-involvingact in the sense that the world of meaning within which they made sense ofEaster was the new world in which sins,their own included, had been forgiven.This did not, of course, reduce the meaning of "Jesus is risen from the dead" to"My sins have been forgiven." It was notsimply a way of saying that Jesus' crucifixion had been a victory rather than a defeat. The first level of "a son of God" un

derstanding of Jesus' resurrection can

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thumbing their noses at the might of Rome) and very serious, so serious that within a couple ofgenerations themight ofRome was trying, and failing, to stamp it out. Itgrew from an essentially positive view of the world. It refused to relinquish the world to the principalities and powers, but claimed even them for the messiah who was nowthe lord.

To use the phrase "son ofGod" for Jesus, in a sensewhich was an implicit confrontation with Caesar, was toaffirm the goodness ofthe created order, now claimed

powerfully by the creator God as his own. The resurrection ofJesus supplies the groundworkfor this: it is thereaffirmation ofthe universe ofspace, time and matter,after not only sin and death but also pagan empire (theinstitutionalization ofsin and death) have done theirworst. The early Christians saw Jesus' resurrection as theaction of the creator God to reaffirm the essential goodness ofcreation and, in an initial and representative actof new creation, to establish a bridgehead within thepresent world ofspace, time and matter through whichthe whole new creation could now come to birth. CallingJesus "son ofGod" within this context ofmeaning, they

became by implication a collection ofrebel cells withinCaesars empire, loyal to a different monarch. The Sad-ducees were right to regard the doctrine of resurrection,and especially its announcement in relation to Jesus, aspolitical dynamite.

This is why to imply that Jesus "went to heaven when

he died," or that he is now simply a spiritual presenceand to suppose that such ideas exhaust the meaning o"Jesus was raised from the dead," is to miss the point, tcut the nerve ofthe 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 earlChristian sense, is the ultimate affirmation that creation matters, that embodied human beings matterThat is why resurrection has always had an inescapabl

political meaning; that is why the Sadducees in the firscentury, and the Enlightenment in our own day, havopposed it so strongly. No tyrant is threatened by Jesugoing to heaven, leaving his body in a tomb. No governments face the authentic Christian challenge when thchurch's social preaching tries to base itself on Jesuteaching detached from the central and energizing facof his resurrection (or when, for that matter, the resurrection is affirmed simply as an example of a super natural "happy ending" which guarantees postmortembliss).

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162. on the Third Day