The Great Breakthrough

It’s hard to write about something so big—something so cosmic. But what I’m trying to tackle today, while immense, is full of everyday significance.

It helps that what I refer to begins in a story, that it is grounded in events that one can recount and tell. So this thing happened—back then, but also, I’m discovering, helps us see how we have with us and within us more than we expected. It helps, too, that the stakes are high, the promise tantalizing: a story of how a dark day opened onto a breathtaking future.

Which, if it happened (or, better said, since it happened) means life as we know it opens onto something better than we could have imagined if our own feelings were all we went by.

It’s no accident that I write today, during this last week of the Easter season. Note, I said season. In traditional Christian practice, Easter is more than a climactic ending to Lent and Good Friday, more than decked-out flowers, chocolate bunnies, and egg hunts as a competitive sport. It goes on for days.

Once, preaching on Easter Sunday, I asked, “Wouldn’t it be great for what we celebrate today to be more than a day but a glorious season in our life?” Indeed, the church from early ages marked off weeks to celebrate, sometimes calling it the Great Fifty Days of Easter, or Eastertide.

What if, I went on, we find that we stand—the world stands—at the threshold of something new, something eagerly to be welcomed, and not just in some liturgical observances? The empty tomb, I tried to say, not only inaugurates a church year emphasis, it opens onto a world in which death has been defeated, in which the worst gets tempered, in which our greatest fear gets met and knocked down.

For lately I’ve been struck by a couple of sometimes-overlooked passages of Scripture. I haven’t paid them much attention until recently. I can barely take it in. The boldness of what they claim astonishes me, and I’ve been pondering what the import of them could mean. “If the Spirit of [God] who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you,” the apostle Paul writes, “he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies” (Romans 8:11). I want to slow those words down, unpack them.

Paul is saying that the power that erupted in the resurrection of Jesus on that day of victory over the forces of evil and injustice and death, is moving around. The same Spirit at work then is still flexing some muscles—in the world as we know it, and the world as we hope it. It’s perhaps simpler to picture it happening in “religious” settings. But Paul is not content to leave the power at work confined to the “spiritual” and “heavenly.”

So again, he drives home the point: and talks about God’s “incomparably great power” for us who believe. God’s power in us and around us, Paul writes, “is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 1:19-20). 

We might be prone to think Paul is getting a little woo-woo here. Like a friend maybe we know who talks about the cosmos addressing him personally while he polishes his mystic crystals, sipping an oat milk turmeric elixir.

But we forget how daily such a truth can feel. What transpired in the risen Jesus has to do with the everyday, not just the eternal. God is working in the little things and big. The seemingly microscopic and the massive. Not in some future eternity, but here and now. Everywhere and all the time.

When telling my friend Daniel about my work on the book manuscript I’ve just turned into my publisher, the demands and the effort and the stretching, and in particular my chapter about the resurrected realities of the living Jesus, he reminded me, “That power you are writing about can also move through you and what you write.” It got me wondering about how many other of our occupations could be infused with a life beyond our own. A vitality that has to do with an eternity that stretches backwards and forwards and lodges us in a present with possibilities we might otherwise miss or neglect.

The theologian Sarah Coakley talks about doing “field work on the Trinity.” She interviewed a series of people involved in renewed, vital churches, people actively living their faith. She recalled one plumber, overflowing with God’s life in his own praying, how he said to her as he carried on his trade, “There are some prayerfully laid pipes in this area.”

The Resurrection in the Worst of Life

The picture enlarges, too. The violence, the consumerism and secularism and unbelief that some of care so much about: What if we knew that the power of God that raised Jesus from death was also at work in those places? What if the Holy Spirit was laboring to bring in the kingdom, renewing us as we try to make a difference? That startling possibility won’t happen automatically. It involves the times and places we volunteer, serving the poor, say, or putting time into bringing change to where there is injustice or disregard for those Jesus called “the least of these.”

You do the work, to be sure, but then spend time with the Gospel accounts of how God reversed death. You engage in prayer, letting these resurrection realities seep into your imagination. You take some moments to peer into the shadows of that first Easter morning. How that image of the scourged Jesus gets undone. You let it soak in: The whole scene gets transformed. Death is reversed. What is sad, to paraphrase J.R.R. Tolkien, becomes untrue. We look again, and with that glimpse, everything seems different. We sense the possibilities. 

The New Testament scholar N. T. Wright reflected on how the hopefulness of the risen Jesus helps us:

What you do in the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that's about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that's shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that's about to be dug up for a building site. You are—strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself—accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God's new world.*

We can learn to expect another force at loose in the world to make a difference. Not in every fractured family, not in every part of life that chafes, not in every relationship break-up or church conflict or social breakdown. But I wonder what place in your life could use the hope of a breakthrough. “Grace means,” writes Anne Lamott, “you’re in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.”

So I think not only of the challenges I face, but also of what Paul called the same strength at work in the resurrection at work in us, even us. Just the picture of that event could keep us from despair. The whiff of new life there might refresh something in us. We will get another glimpse that changes everything, so we keep going.

 * N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

Tim Jones