So, I've been reading and thinking a lot about misunderstanding words. Or more accurately, the way words change in meaning over time. Since, I'm a big geek and mostly ready theology books (especially Biblical Theology books) I've been mostly thinking about the way a 1st Century Palestinian would understand a word versus how we understand it today. Appropriate for the season maybe we should look at what the word resurrection means. The first thought that come to my head is zombies. We have the popularity of "The Walking Dead" to help us all think about zombies. Doesn't resurrection sound just a little like zombies? Jesus got up out of the grave after being dead for a while and on top of that we eat Jesus' flesh and drink his blood...zombies.
That's definitely not what first century folks were thinking about when they heard the word resurrection, and probably not most of you. Sometimes as N.T. Wright writes about in "Surprised by Hope" we confuse resurrection with a great soul migration. We dismiss the material and make it a move to the spiritual. This is an easy move to make. This world sucks so we are going to leave it behind as we transition through death to a purely spiritual life. This is what Plato was apparently all about (I'm excited because I'm going to read some Plato soon). It's what the Gnostics were all about. If you don't know they were a heretical sect of Christianity that considered the material world to be evil and the spiritual was good. The only thing that mattered was the non-corrupted soul because your body was evil. It's an easy thing to slip into because we can look around and see how much evil there is. But God did call the world good in Genesis and the end of that story called everything very good so maybe the material is rebellious and incomplete rather than evil.
So what does resurrection mean? Jesus' resurrection was the first resurrection of many to come. The resurrection was so surprising to the first century because they thought it was going to happen all at once. All of the faithful who died was going to be resurrected all at once into a new life in which God dwells among the people. It's an end times vision, not end of the material world, but rather the renewal and completion of the material world. Christ's resurrection means that this renewed age has begun and was a sign that this world is being transformed into the complete vision of God. Resurrection is a symbol, which participates in and points to God's coming transformation of this world into heaven. And we are called to continue showing glimpses of this resurrection to the world that is continually being transformed into something better than we can ever imagine.
What do you think about when we talk about resurrection? Zombies? Going to Heaven? Something else?
