The Age to Come Now

The Physical Reality of the Resurrection

A reflection on the resurrection of Jesus, emphasising its physical reality. He challenges the common perception of the resurrection as merely spiritual or metaphorical, underscoring its tangible, bodily nature. Fr Richard critiques traditional views of eternal life influenced by Greek philosophy, advocating instead for a biblical understanding of transformation and new creation. He shares personal reflections on grief and loss, highlighting the hope the resurrection brings. Fr Richard encourages us to embody the love and compassion of the resurrection, becoming beacons of hope in our world.

00:00:00 One of the things that the gospel accounts are so very clear about is the physical reality of the resurrection of Jesus. It wasn’t just a movement in their hearts. It wasn’t that suddenly they began to have really good thoughts about Jesus. No, we ate and we drank with him. He was physically present. We reached out and touched him. You know, next Sunday we will hear the Gospel of Thomas as he was invited to put his fingers into the wounds that the nails made to put his hand in the side of Jesus. It’s not a ghost that is appearing. It’s not just something that warms us in our hearts, and we’re able to have more pleasant thoughts about overcoming death. No, this is this absolutely physical reality that Jesus is bringing for all of us. And we kind of think of the resurrection in terms of this idea of eternal life that the gift that Christians have is that death will not have their final sting over us. But again, for so many Christians, we’re more Platonist than we are Christian than we are Jewish.

00:01:18 We think of of eternal life as our souls going to heaven. You know, when I grew up, everyone just spoke about souls. It was all about saving souls. It was all about praying for your soul. It was about being released to go to heaven and heaven. How do we imagine it? You know, it’s just this kind of place where the angels sit around on clouds and play harps, and it’s very boring and very weird kind of imagery. And none of it is biblical. None of those images that we so often have about heaven and about what life might be in the future. None of those images come from the Bible. They come from marketing. They come from from weird sorts of ideas. And often it’s it’s from Greek philosophy rather than from the scriptures. So when we ponder what that means. I mean, the first thing we need to take account of is that we miss translate that Hebrew phrase that forms that that experience of what Jesus is inviting us into. Ha Olam HaBa [העולם הבא] is the phrase that is is there, and it’s this phrase that is inviting us into the age to come.

00:02:36 That sense of we’re able to drag from the future. This age, this, this epoch, this period of time. And Hebrew isn’t very kind of specific about it. It doesn’t really have a clear kind of sense of tenses as, as we do. And other languages kind of have. So Hebrew is inviting us into this reality. We know what happens now. We experience death. We we suffer because of death. You know, we grieve when someone dies. You know, I’ve spent the last few days really just remembering my spiritual director who died on Holy Thursday, Father Michael Fallon msc. And kind of just pondering the gift that he was in my life and kind of wondering and pondering, you know, where is he? What’s he experiencing now? All those kinds of questions of what happens when someone dies. But we’re also invited into this richer reality, this, this deeper sense that, yes, we know that the present age is marked by death, by sin, by disease, by destruction, by the whole reality of things that we don’t want to to have.

00:03:49 You know, the present age is is marked by a mixture of things. There’s moments when we are able to turn ourselves to God. There are moments when we see the light of the world being brought into our own experiences. There are wonderful moments of compassion and hope and joy, but there’s also war, and there’s also violence. And there’s also all kinds of acts that drag people down and cast hate upon each other. There isn’t this sense of of this community that is able to build each other up. We’re still overwhelmed by the climate change and things like that, and we don’t seem to be capable of actually responding to those situations. So the present age is still marked by death and sin and disease, but the age to come, the age of the life of God, that will be this age of transformation. And it’s not about escaping from the earth. It’s about transforming this world. It’s about the new creation. It’s about the life of God being present in our world. And we get hints of that.

00:04:53 We begin to see little moments when we were able to recognize that that’s what we’re longing for. That’s the moment that we’re wanting to experience in our lives, that we’re wanting to drag the life of the age to come into this present reality. And all of that begins on the moment when it’s still dark, when it’s still very early on the first day of the week when the women and of course it was the women who went to the tomb. Out of their care and their compassion and their love and their desire to make sure that the body of Jesus was treated as well as possible. No one expected, it seemed the resurrection: even though Jesus had spoken so clearly about it. Everyone thought that when they got to the tomb, the stone would still be there, that they would need somebody to help them to roll the stone away so they could go into the tomb and treat the body. Continue to go through the process of the Jewish burial rites of improperly embalming it. They hadn’t been able to do that properly on the afternoon of the 14th of Nisan, because they weren’t able, because of the feast, to be able to spend the time that they needed to do that properly, because they came here after the Sabbath to to make sure that the body was well looked after.

00:06:09 And suddenly he’s not there. And every single one of the resurrection accounts has some of those details of the women being the first going, wondering how they’re going to move the stone away. The stone was there and the tomb is empty. And there are messages that come, angelic messengers that come and say, why are you looking for the living among the dead? That’s the moment that everything changes. That’s the moment when the life of the age to come is able to be present in this present age. Do the women understand, as Mary of Magdala? Understand? She loves Jesus and she’s caught up in the grief. But does she understand in that moment? It seems not. But slowly, over the course of the next few days, they begin to realize, and their wildest dreams are suddenly coming true. Their wildest hopes are beginning to be realized, and they understand, especially at the end of the 50 days and the feast of Short and the Feast of Pentecost that they’re able to experience through the power of the Holy Spirit, that they are able to have their minds fully changed and transformed to understand what the resurrection is all about.

00:07:19 And so today, we can also experience this change and this transformation, we can begin to encounter the God who is present in the age to come, the God in that age when life will finally make sense, when death and disease will be destroyed, when our sins will finally be redeemed and will no longer have those desires to live in hatred and violence and lies and dysfunction, that we will be able to be changed and transformed to be the people and the creation that God has called us to be. It’s long that that age might indeed break forth within our church, that we might be this shining beacon of the resurrection life, that we might be people who so clearly love one another and so clearly care for each other, that other people begin to see that that’s what the age of the life to come looks like. That’s what this present age can be. If we begin to live in the reality of the resurrection each day. Let’s indeed be the people that make Halleluyah a song. Halleluyah is a Hebrew word, and it’s actually kind of several words that are tied together in a phrase.

00:08:29 Hello is the first part of that, and it’s actually an invitation to each other. It’s a call to other people around us to lift our hearts in praise. To be caught up in the moment of that praise. Hallel-lu-Yah. Yah is the short form of Yahweh. That that’s the invitation of who we are praising. Of what our minds and our hearts are being lifted up to, into the reality of the God who lives among us. So Hallelujah is, of course, the most appropriate thing for us to declare and to say during this Easter season, after 46 days of not being able to say it, that now we are changed, now we recognize this gift of his grace. And so we speak to each other. We declare to each other. Hallelujah! Yeah. Hallelujah. Yeah. Yes. It is good for us to lift our voices in praise. It’s good for us to make that declaration of praise to the God who is no longer dead. But he is alive.