God Bless Tom Wright for telling it like it is, namely, that the Church has been trivializing Easter and that “Christians must keep their nerve – the Resurrection isn’t a metaphor, it’s a physical fact.” Amen, Brother!
Tom Wright’s article, The Church Must Stop Trivialising Easter, is one every Christian ought to read and that’s why I’m providing a link to it today. Here’s just a few of Wright’s gems embedded in his article:
- Easter was the pilot project. What God did for Jesus He intends to do for the whole creation. Christians are called to be new-creation people here and now.
- True meaning has remained hidden; the Church has trivialised it; the world has rubbished it. Church has turned Jesus’s Resurrection into a “happy ending” after the dark and messy story of Good Friday.
- “Resurrection” to first century Jews wasn’t about “going to heaven” rather the physically dead being physically alive again. Nobody back then expected just one person to be bodily raised from the dead in the middle of history.
- The Resurrection is not what social science calls “cognitive dissonance”. Resurrection is not about someone coming back into the present mode of life, rather, someone going on into a new sort of existence, bodily.
- Split between God and the “real” world produces a public life lurching between anarchy and tyranny; an aesthetic swinging dramatically between sentimentalism and brutalism.
- Politicians can not save the world.
- Death is final weapon of the tyrant, the anarchist; resurrection indicates this weapon doesn’t have “the last word”.
- Church must work with Easter energy of justice and beauty, facing down skeptics, speaking once more of Jesus in a way that will be heard.
The Right Rev Dr Tom Wright is Bishop of Durham
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