Surprised by Hope - Love

Quote from page 288 of N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope, Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

The point of 1 Corinthians 13 is that love is not our duty; it is our destiny. It is the language Jesus spoke, and we are called to speak it so that we can converse with him. It is the food they eat in the God's new world, and we must acquire the taste for it here and now. It is the music God has written for all his creatures to sing, and we are called to learn it and practice it now so as to be ready when the conductor brings down his baton. It is the resurrection life, and the resurrected Jesus call us to begin living it with him and for him right now Love is at the very heart of the surprise of hope: people who truly hope as the resurrection encourages us to hope will be people enabled to love in a new way. Conversely, people who are living this rule of love will be people who are learning more deeply how to hope.

Surprised by Hope - Christ's Ascension

I have summarized some of N.T. Wright's comments on Christ's Ascension from his book, Suprised by Hope, Rethinking Heaven, the Ressurection, and the Mission of the Church. I thought his comments were insightful and got me thinking about the importance of Christ's ascension.

Comments from chapter 7 Jesus, Heaven, and New Creation on The Ascension.

We can’t only believe that Jesus was raised from the dead but closely linked to this is his ascension into heaven. You can’t confuse one with the other or assume they are the same thing. They are linked but they are different.

Luke is the only gospel writer that tells the story of Christ’s ascension. And he mentions is twice, once at the end of Luke and then again at the beginning of Acts. As if to say (and this is me, not Wright) that Christ’s ascension serves as the end of one era and the beginning of another.

Recent writings have revealed that when the church has ignored or misunderstood the ascension a lot of other teachings and practices go wrong. There are two directions that the church has gone in its understanding of the ascension. One is flat literalism; the other modernistic skepticism.

How should we think about the ascension?
• It is that the ascension demands that we think differently about how the whole cosmos is, so to speak, put together and that we also think differently about the church and about salvation.
• Heaven and earth are not different locations within the same continuum of space and matter. They are to different dimensions of God’s good creation. Heaven relates to earth tangentially so that one who is in heaven can be present simultaneously anywhere and everywhere on earth: the ascension means that Jesus is available and accessible, without people having travel to a particular spot on earth to find him. Second, heaven is, as it were the control room of earth. Jesus said, “All authority has been given me to me, in heaven and on earth.”
• Jesus is in heaven in a human (resurrected) body. Some people believe that Jesus was divine, stopped being divine (his earthly mission) and became divine again (his ascension). It is because we have a Platonic view of heaven as a “spiritual” no material place so that the idea of a solid body being not only present but also thoroughly at home there seems like a category mistake.
• Jesus is in charge not only in heaven but on earth. Not just in the future, but now. The church’s message is that we announce that there is a new sheriff in town. And things will start to be different.
• There is a danger that when the church ignores or downplays the ascension that it (the church) fills the vacuum. Jesus more or less becomes indentified with the church instead of being in heaven ruling over and above the church, sometimes against the church, and speaking to the church. The church instead of presenting Jesus as Lord and itself as the world’s servant sees itself linked directly with the presence of Jesus. So that its structures, practices, leadership, buildings and liturgy become identified with Him. What do you get when this happens?
1. Insolence of office on the one hand
2. The despair of late middle ages on the other as people realize that it doesn’t work.

Quoting N.T. Wright : “Only when we grasp firmly that the church is not Jesus and Jesus is not the church – when we grasp, in other words, the truth of the ascension, that the one who is indeed present with us by the Spirit is also the Lord over against us, the one who tells Mary Magdalene not to cling to him – only then are we rescued form both hollow triumphalism and shallow despair.
Conversely, only when we grasp and celebrate the fact that Jesus has gone on ahead of us into God’s space, God’s new world, and is both already ruling the rebellious present world as its rightful Lord and also interceding for us at the Father’s right hand – when we grasp and celebrate, in other words, what the ascension tells us about Jesus’ continuing human work in the present – are we rescued from a wrong view of world history and equipped for the task of justice in the present.”

With the resurrected Jesus in heaven we begin to see the trinity in a new light. The resurrected Jesus is still distinct from while indentified with God the Father on one hand and the Spirit on the other hand.

This is me: Once we understand the ascension and the work of Christ, and our work in connection to his, once we see that we are not Jesus, but that we are to declare his rule, then will appreciate and understand better the return that was promised in Acts 1:11. We will not see it as our goal to leave this earth and make heaven our home, but with pray with fervency, the kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Then the Spirit and the bride in unison will say come.