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BONUS Subscriber only Easter Show: What does Easter mean for the mission of the Church today? Tom Wright and Mike Bird
00:28:31
A Tom Wright seminar with Mike Bird on what the Resurrection has to say to the Church and its mission with Tom Wright and Mike Bird
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A
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A
Fees apply. Tom, have you heard the good news? No, not about Jesus's death and resurrection, the forgiveness of sins. Rather, have you heard the good news about our subscriber episodes?
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B
Yeah, I don't really understand how all these things work, but I do understand that this is going to be a way of getting great content out to all sorts of people. So I'm all in favor.
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A
We get all these great questions from people, Tom, but you and I talk after the show and think, oh boy, it'd be great if we could discuss this thing on justification or the Holy Spirit or something on mission, or if we could grind through a particular biblical book at some length and in some depth. But we don't have the apparatus to do that until right now. With this new subscription service, people can join this great intimate and informative conversations that we'll be having. They can be part of the journey with us. I mean, Tom, do you find that exciting? Is it exciting as watching Australia defeat England in an Ashes test match, answering.
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Questions for just a few Minutes is great. And that has to happen. There are many questions where one has to say, look, let's take a deep breath, let's spread this out a bit more fully and let's deal with the different aspects of this topic. And that's what these longer subscriber episodes are really going to be about. That is exciting to me. In the same way that when I do courses of lectures and I get Q and A from people, I sometimes say, if there's enough of you who want to talk about this, let's fix a whole hour and go to a quiet seminar room and actually go through it step by step. So all sorts of things that we are talking about briefly can then open up and expand and doing that either topic by topic or book by book. That's a great way of going at it.
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A
I think you're right, Tom, because sometimes it's not a sound bite. What you need is a seminar. Tom and I are inviting you to be part of that very seminar. To be in the room where it happens, where we're going to go through Biblical book, we're going to talk about the big topic of the day. We really hope that you'll come and join us. It is going to be fantastic. You do not want to miss out.
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B
Yeah, totally agree.
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The Ask NT Write Anything podcast. Hello and welcome to a special episode of Ask Anti Write Anything, the show where we look at all of your questions about Jesus, the Bible and the life of faith. And because it's Easter, we are zeroing in on Easter. We're gonna look at what does the resurrection mean for us today? Because, Tom, as you would know, the resurrection can mean a great number things to different people ranging from myth or metaphor. But you know, one of the things that doesn't get mentioned enough for my mind is how the resurrection affects mission. You know, resurrection is normally associated with something that happens to Jesus. Something happens to the righteous at the end of history. But you know, what is the difference that the resurrection makes, Tom, in. In our own life in church? The mission, the purpose of the church, what's resurrection got to do with that? I feel like that's a big hole in our understanding. Tom, what are your thoughts on that?
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B
I very much agree with that. My mind goes back to the first time I was in Jerusalem, which was in Holy Week and Easter in 1989. I think it must have been when I was on sabbatical out there and I went to a sunrise service at one of the great gatherings in Jerusalem for Easter. And it was very much in the English and American Christian context. And we had a great sermon all about Easter and about Jesus being raised from the dead. And the whole point of the sermon was, therefore, there is a life after death. And therefore, if you believe in Jesus, you will go and join him in heaven. And I came away from that service profoundly unsatisfied and indeed troubled at the thought that the message of resurrection itself, the message of a new bodily life and of new creation for the whole world, was simply being sidelined. And there we were in Jerusalem. It was during one of the intifadas, one of the Palestinian uprising moments when you might have thought that there would be some spin off in terms of the immediate tasks of the church in a very difficult and troubled political situation where particularly the Palestinian Christians found themselves in the crosshairs, as it were, between the more militant Muslim Palestinians and of course, the quite militant Jewish movements, of which, I mean, various different Jewish movements, of course. But the church that I was with, St. George's Jerusalem, had a Palestinian congregation. And I thought, surely for them there has to be more application to what's going on. But I hadn't at that stage worked out how one might get there. But I remember it dawned on me as I was then thinking about that in the four Gospels and then in the beginning of Acts, which is the other place where we get a scene of the risen Jesus. At no point does anybody say in Matthew, Mark, Luke or John or Acts, ah, Jesus has been raised from the dead, therefore there is a life after death, and therefore we're going to heaven. That is simply not what those passages are about. Rather, the message is, Jesus has been raised from the dead, therefore he really is the Messiah, and he always was the Messiah. And a bit later they say, well, and therefore this is how his death means, what it means. But primarily Jesus was and is the Messiah. And therefore we have a job to do. And very quickly, in the resurrection narratives, in the Gospels and the beginning of Acts, that Job, that task of the church, flows directly from Jesus resurrection. Think of the end of Matthew 28, the so called Great Commission, where Jesus says, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples. And the echoes, the biblical resonances of that saying. Take us back to Daniel, chapter seven, which is all about the exaltation of the one, like a son of man, over the beasts, over the monsters, over the powers of the world, the powers that carve up the world between them. And we know a certain amount in our own day about powers carving up the world between them. And Daniel 7 says, well, the powers rant and rage and the monsters do this and that, but God will raise up his son, his Messiah, the one like a son of man. And so Daniel brings together this sense of a messianic victory with the sense of the new creation, where the one, the true Adam, is set in authority over the animals, over the monsters. And Jesus says, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me, therefore you go and make disciples. Now you might think, if all authority in heaven and earth has been given to Jesus, why don't we sit back and let Jesus go and make disciples, since he's obviously in charge. And the answer is exactly as with Genesis 1, where God is in complete authority and commissions human beings to take forward his purposes for the world. So when Jesus is exalted, he commissions his followers, starting with the 11, the ones he'd commissioned from the beginning during the course of his public career, commissions them to take forward his work. This is all to do. Well, partly all to do with the fact that the God of the Bible is a power sharing God. God is not grabbing power and hugging it to himself and saying, the rest of you just have to watch. No, rather because we are made in God's image. God wants to work in and through us. And that's now happening because of the resurrection. So Matthew 28, you get that Mark 16, the resurrection chapter in Mark is truncated. It stops very suddenly. They said nothing to everyone, for they were afraid. I'm one of those who thinks that the original ending of Mark was lost and that various people have tried to round it off in different ways, but. So we don't have the same kind of commissioning as you get in Matthew, though I suspect that in Mark's Gospel there was something like that originally. But then in Luke chapter 24, where you get the matchless scene of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, when Jesus is explaining the scriptures to them. And then when they arrive at the house and he breaks the bread and they recognize him, what do they do? They run back to tell the others. That's the whole imperative. Once you discover that Jesus is alive, you're going to have to share this. This is just amazing. Like when you found your new best friend, you want to introduce her or him to your existing friends. That's how it works. And then Jesus says now to the disciples back in the upper room, that they now have a mission, a mission to the world, that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be announced in Jesus name to all the nations beginning from Jerusalem, because the whole world is now seen to be rushing off in the wrong direction. And repent means stop rushing in that direction and try coming in this direction instead. And when people say, oh, we can't do that, we're so stuck in all the patterns of behavior that we've been in. No, there is this thing called forgiveness. All those dark patterns of behavior have been dealt with on the cross. Therefore there is this thing, individual and corporate, to turn away from that nonsense, from those crazy ways of behaving. And this is part of the message of resurrection. Resurrection. And the task of the church is that the church is commissioned, commissioned to be people who say, turn back and come the other way. And do so knowing that you can leave the past behind you because God has dealt with it. So you've got it in Matthew, you've got it in Luke, you've got it in John chapter 20. Perhaps most spectacularly, when John emphasizes, it's the first day of the week, that's John 21, on the first day of the week, very early. And he then re emphasizes it in verse 19, the evening of that day, the first day of the week. In other words, this is the beginning of God's new creation. This is the eighth day of creation, if you like. This is when everything is coming out new. So how is that going to work out? Well, Jesus breathes on his disciples. He passes on to them his own spirit, like God breathing into human nostrils the breath of life in Genesis 2. And Jesus says, as the Father sent me, so I send you. I remember when I was first working on Jesus scholarship and historical questions about Jesus. The more I was understanding Jesus in his own context at one level, the more remote he seemed to be from my context and from the modern world. And then I suddenly tripped over this line in John chapter 20 as so here is the model. As Jesus to Israel, so the church to the world. And if you think that sounds scary, difficult, dangerous, you're right. But the answer is, receive the Holy Spirit. And now it will be God working in and through you. And everything that is said about the Spirit is in service of that. That by the Spirit the church is enabled to go out into the world and to be for the world what Jesus had been for his people. Well, how has John told us about Jesus and Israel? We've seen the seven signs, the great signs whereby Jesus reveals the glory of God, starting with the turning of water into win, going on through healings and so on, climaxing both in the raising of Lazarus from the dead and then in the sign of the cross itself. And so again and again, I think we need to take time to think, what would it mean for the church to be in and for the world like Jesus was in and for Israel? And there are two things which are going on there which then give rise to a further three. And I'll just make this as brief as I can, because one of the things which I think we see In Romans chapter 8 particularly is lament. As we look out at the world, we look at the new life of God in the resurrection of Jesus, we look at the world still in a mess, and we bring that lament before God in prayer. And somehow the good news of the resurrection, this is as in the middle of Romans chapter 8, takes hold of that lament and enables that lament in prayer to be part of the means by which God is in fact working his purpose out. And then the other half of that which I see in Romans 15, is that the unity of the church, for which Paul prays and works extremely hard, Romans 14 and 15, particularly the unity of the church, is meant to be the sign of what God is going to do for the whole creation. Paul speaks about the God of hope, filling you with joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Spirit you may abound in hope, because the unity of the church reflects the unity of God's new creation. And so if we keep our churches disunited the way we do, don't be surprised if we lose our grip on the promise of resurrection. But if we work hard at coming together across traditional boundaries, which is what Romans 14 and 15 are all about, this is meant to be the resurrection fueled sign of hope for the world. So then, as I expounded it in my book surprised by Hope, some years ago, I guess 15 or more years ago, now there are three things which stand out for me, and they are an odd trio, if you like. I've never seen this put together anywhere else. Justice, beauty, and evangelism. Now, most people, when they think of evangelism, they think about telling people to turn away from their sins, to trust Jesus so that they can go to heaven. So why would you bother about justice and beauty? And the answer is God is putting the whole world right. That's the message of the resurrection. God has launched his putting right project. Now that's what God is engaged in until the time when God is all in all. God isn't throwing creation away, he is remaking it. Now, if the church is not concerned about justice in the world and in its own Life in the church, then what sort of message does it give? If we try to say with words that God is putting the world right, it'll only mean things to people if we are seen to be people who are bothered about and working at putting the world right. Likewise with beauty, if we're talking about a new creation, which would be like the present beautiful creation, only much, much more so, think of the most beautiful scenery you can imagine and then think that's just the beginning. This is act one, if you like, of God's creation. And there's a further act to come in which this will be even greater and more enhanced. But if in the process, the church doesn't bother about beauty, about art, about music, about drama, about all the human culture that we have been given in order to help people understand and imagine and think of the possibility that there might be a greater world yet to come, that's what the best art and music makes us think, then don't be surprised if people aren't getting the resurrection message. So in between justice and beauty, if you like, we have evangelism, which is not the message of here's how to escape the world, but here's how to be part of God's Jesus shaped project for redeeming the world. The gospel, the word gospel in the first century was the proclamation of a new emperor or some new ruler. This is good news. We are going to be able to live at peace because so and so is now ruling. But the good news that the Christians had is that God's new world has been unveiled in King Jesus, who is the Lord of the world. And therefore the message of evangelism isn't here's how to escape the world, it's here's how to be part of God's people for the world. And in the middle of that, of course, it involves a personal turning away from everything that's getting in the way of that, and a personal turning to Jesus himself to receive him gladly, to be shaped by him. And so, as in Ephesians chapter three, to be filled with the fullness of God, because Paul's vision in Ephesians 1, 2 and 3 is that the church should be the small working model of new creation. That's resurrection and the task of the church, the church is both to model and to be the agent of new creation right now, because it's all pointing forward to the time when God will do for the whole creation what he did for Jesus at Easter and what he does for you and me right here and now.
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A
That's a great way of summarizing some very complex points about how the Resurrection generates the mission of the church. You know, for a start, as you said, you know, Jesus has all authority, not just in heaven and on earth. And then he. He gives us tasks from his authority to lead to the renewal of creation. And I think that that tripartite list you gave of justice, beauty, evangelism is three things we can all take away from the Resurrection. But there's one thing that was going through my mind as you're saying that, Tom. It's when you talked about signposts of hope. And as I look around the world right now, you know, this is 2025 when we're recording this, I see a lot of despair, a lot of desolation, a lot of hopelessness. And yet what gives me a sense of joy and makes me refuse to give in to feelings of melancholy and despair is the fact that Christ is risen. You know, the despots of this world, the demons, death itself, did their worst to the Son of God, but they were no match. And as you've said, I think this is your language. I think this is your language, Tom. I think you said Easter was when hope in person came onto the scene. And this allows me to now marry together my two great loves, both scripture and Star Wars. Because we learn from Star wars that rebellions are built on hope. And because hope in person has appeared in Christ, we now can launch a whole rebellion against the demons, the despots, the forces of death in this world, and proclaim the new life of Christ. Tom, what is the function of hope? What is, to quote Barack Obama, what is the audacity of hope that Christians possess in their mission today?
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B
Yeah, it is. And I love that image, though I'm afraid I'm not a fan of Star wars. And it's not that I've seen it and don't like it. It's just that it's a different culture, a different time. You're so young, Mike, you know, compared to some of us oldies. But actually, everything that you said about Star wars resonates for me with Psalm 2. Psalm 2 is about the nations raging and warring many times at the moment. And we're recording this in the spring of 2025 many times at the moment. As I look at the news, I find myself praying Psalm 2 about the nations raging and ranting and God laughing at them and saying, actually, I am putting my Messiah in charge of the world, and I pray day by day for that in chargeness to be worked out and for crazy rulers who are doing stupid things to be rebuked and put to shame and for wisdom to prevail. And it seems to me that's at the heart of it. When we're talking about hope, we're talking about God's ultimate future, but also all the penultimate futures which God wants to bring about. You know, looking back, it's a cliche, but looking back two centuries, the abolition of slavery, even though different modern forms of slavery have kept crept back in, alas. But we now recognize and we name and we shame them and we do our best to root them out. That's what happens when you get rid of something evil. It will creep back, but once you've recognized it as evil, then you should be able to deal with it more readily. Whereas 300 years ago, people just said, oh, slavery, that's just the way the world is. But that was a sign that real radical change is possible. Something which had been accepted for many, many centuries. People realize this is not the way it should be. In God's new world, all should be free. And in the same way, when the rabbis, when some of the hard line rabbis were strict about the keeping of Shabbat, the Sabbath was because one day a week, the Sabbath is the sign of God's coming kingdom. So they said, you shouldn't even kill a fly on Shabbat because According to Isaiah 11, all species in God's new world will live at peace. And that sense of glimpsing the hope and then saying, what can we do to make that a reality now, maybe not totally and completely, but as much as we possibly can. And if you have to do it one day a week in order to start the process, that's one way of doing it. But there are so many things promised us in God's new creation which we can and should be working at here and now. As I said, Paul emphasizes the unity of, of the church across traditional ethnic divisions as a sign of hope, not just as a present imperative. Oh, wouldn't it be nice to get together? But rather as the sign in the present to the watching world. Because the world notices when stuff like that happens. You know, one of the reasons that apartheid in South Africa crumbled was because black Christians and white Christians and colored Christians started to worship together and started to witness joyfully together. And people like Desmond Tutu were giving a lead to it. And people didn't know you could do that. They were locked in their boxes. And those Christians, those daring Christians, were signs of hope. There is a new way of doing stuff. It is possible. Now what are the steps we have to take by which it can become a reality? And so again and again, you know, we said this to ourselves. There is a new reality which is our own personal resurrection from the dead, having left sin and death behind entirely. Well, it's already given to us in our faith and in our baptism. So what's to stop us working at anticipating that in the present? That's how hope works. The vision plays back into the present and says, actually this has been launched in the resurrection of Jesus. We have been given the Spirit. There's no excuse for not working at it right here and now.
- [25:52]
A
That's well put, Tom. And I think that's a great way to remember that the resurrection does matter. It matters for mission and it matters for our testimony in the world. But if you want to know more about resurrection and mission, I I really do recommend to you Tom's book Surprised by Hope. That is Tom's best selling book for a reason. And the reason will become very self evident when you read the book and you can get it from sbck, Amazon or somewhere like Logos as well. And I think Tom's also you've got your admirato course on the resurrection where you go into this topic in even more depth in some easy to watch lessons. So yes, and I think Tom and I also want to thank all these subscribers to the show. We're very grateful for that because it provides an extra level of support to Premiere and all the great digital shows and products and the materials that they put out that are more important than ever in a very complicated and confused world, whether online or in the flesh. Remember too that if you've got any questions about mission, about hope that you'd like to hear Tom answer, you can always send them to us@askantyright.com but otherwise we wish you a blessed Easter period. It's farewell from me, Mike Burton, and.
- [27:16]
B
Farewell from me, Tom Wright.
- [27:18]
A
We'll see you again on the next episode of Ask NT Wright Anything. Well, that was part one. I hope you enjoyed it.
- [27:25]
B
Part two drops next week, but remember it's for subscribers only, so don't miss out.
- [27:31]
A
Subscribe today for just 3.99 US dollars.
- [27:35]
B
Per month at askntyrite.com or tap. Subscribe if you're listening on Apple Podcasts.
- [27:42]
A
We hope to see you there.