In his volume Jesus and the Victory of God, Bishop N. T. Wright writes,
“If [Jesus] was a teacher of timeless truths, the announcer of the timeless call to decision, or the pioneer of a new way of being-in-the-world, his resurrection would presumably endorse the programme he had articulated; though, interestingly, those who have constructed Jesus-figures like that tend not to include the resurrection in their schemes, except as a metaphor for the rise of the Christian faith. But if he was an eschatological prophet/Messiah, announcing the kingdom and dying in order to bring it about, the resurrection would declare that he had in principle succeeded in his task, and that his earlier redefinitions of the coming kingdom had pointed to a further task awaiting his followers, that of implementing what he had achieved. Jesus, after all, as a good first century Jew, believed that Israel functioned to the rest of the world as the hinge to the door; what he had done for Israel, he had done in principle for the whole world. It makes sense, within his aims, as we have studied them, to suppose that he envisaged his followers becoming in their turn Isaianic heralds, lights to the world” (660).
In other words, the way that Jesus’ teaching has been abstracted from history makes our identities as Christians and the significance of the resurrection in our lives abstract. Trying to make the gospel timeless and transcendent makes it meaningless and empty. But in the particularity of Jesus’ self-identity, words, and deeds we find the establishment of our own identities and the investing of significance in our own words and deeds. Moreover, as the new creation, the resurrection is a commission, not merely a doctrine or a metaphor regarding our souls (though it certainly is a doctrine, too!). It initiates something new about our bodily existence, namely that we are redemption for this world as he was redemption for Israel. This means real redemption—a redemption as real as our bodies. How do we know? Because Jesus has been there, done that and might even be wearing a t-shirt that says “I survived Death’s Sting–and defeated it, to boot!” Death isn’t abstract, sin isn’t abstract so redemption cannot be abstract, removed from the everydayness of our lives. Once we receive redemption, we are commissioned to bear redemption to the world.
