Life’s desire for itself bursts through death’s hold.

Suddenly all I know of life and death is subverted. For surely death follows life and is the end. But here, life’s desire for itself bursts through death’s hold. A beginning beyond the end. My logic of cause and effect, inverted.

This is no mere historic event that fits into our sequence of time. All of time forever changed. The past has new meaning; the present, overwhelming; the future, a promise of this joy unending.

The narrative has been reversed!

A single honest voice can no longer be silenced by the shouting of a crowd. The powers of state and religion can no longer manipulate with fear … for Jesus faced our fear for us and exposed its empty lie. The resurrection means the story has just begun … It continues to unfold in me.

Resurrection

The resurrection transforms the human story like no other event. For the first time we come face to face with our murdered victim. Before this event we consoled ourselves with the belief that the brutal death of our victims must have been the will of God. Otherwise, why would he allow it? But when Peter declares that the one we killed was raised up by God, it is obvious that God is not complicit in our act of murder. Stephan too, in his address to the religious leaders, makes it clear that Jesus was betrayed and murdered by humans. But God raised him up and honored him. It is Stephan’s vision of Jesus at the right hand of God that is unbearable to those who hear him. 

What is even more surprising is the message of the resurrected victim. The blood of all our victims prior to Christ called out for one thing – vengeance! But Jesus’ blood speaks a better message than the blood of Abel (Heb. 12:24). Jesus breaks out of the cycle of retributive justice, offers forgiveness, and calls both victims and victimizers to repentance. We can understand why victimizers should repent, but why would victims need repentance? Because both have allowed themselves to be formed by violence. Even in resisting injustice, the victim too is formed by violence. The resurrected Jesus transcends both these categories and shows us what it means to be fully human. To resist rivalry and refuse to be defined by violence is essential in returning to the image and likeness of God. 

Paradise Restored or New Creation?

In what way does the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus save us? Does he restore us to an original state of perfection? 

Where our first archetype stopped the creative process of becoming the image and likeness of God, Jesus, the new archetype, resets the process. Through him we may again enter the Eden of possibilities, the flow of becoming divine. Through Christ we can exit the state of grasping and enter a position of receiving.

The haste of sin is finally a desire for closure, a wish to be done with waiting, which can manifest itself as much in the decision to settle for far lower than what is intended for one as in a grasping after what is higher. The uniting factor in both cases is the desire no longer to be liable to the operation of another. 

(Jeff Vogel, “The Haste of Sin, the Slowness of Salvation: An Interpretation of Irenaeus on the Fall and Redemption,” Anglican Theological Review 89, no. 3 (2007))

If the essence of human error was the haste with which we sought to bring an end to uncertainty – the sense of lack that urged us to possess and the act in which we closed ourselves to the possibilities of divine gifts – then restoration is placing us back in that position where we may once again be open to divine possibilities. The salvation Christ offers is neither a restoration to a state of original perfection, nor an advance to the end of our journey, but a positioning in which the gift is possible again. It is partaking of the mind of Christ in which both the logic and creative novelty are operative. Divine logic is not the kind of certainty that closes us up to possibility. Neither is divine creativity the kind of imaginative spirituality that has no grounding in reason. The mind of Christ is both the sober insight into reality as it is and the joyful expectation that reality may be transformed.

Somewhere within human history, a turn was made towards violence. The narrative took a turn and its trajectory pointed towards futility. It became a boringly predictive dead-end story. The fear of death became the underlying anxiety that motivated the human drama. These cycles of self-preservation and violence were deeply embedded in our psyche. Adam is the personification of this history and if you are human it is part of your story. Today still, this narrative framework is the confinement within which many understand themselves and view the world. 

When security becomes more important than the adventure, when the comfort of the familiar becomes more attractive than the thrill of the unknown, when we grasp for certainty at the expense of being astonished, and when we embrace an order so rigid that there is no space for bewilderment, then the same fallen narrative of the first Adam continues to imprison us. As our frameworks of interpretation become hardened, life becomes brittle and the inevitable takes the place of the possible.

Jesus models a new way of life, an openness to the God of possibility. His confidence is not in the correctness of his own desires or ideas, but in the assurance that comes from another. He discovers a source beyond himself. And it is in relationship with this Creator that his own creativity comes into its fullness. Union with God does not dissolve him but enables him to become more distinctly, truly, and freely himself. And this God-man union has surprising implications for God as well. God is not limited or reduced in this union but finds opportunity to love and exist fully and freely. Jesus is the archetype of this union. He is the realization of this ideal within human history.

God is excited about your life my friend! In you God sees an opportunity to live and move and have his being in a way that is absolutely unique. Nowhere else does he have the relationships he has in you. And what he offers is nothing less than the freedom and ability to co-create with him. Together, he anticipates a journey filled with astonishment, wonder, and beauty – a path with surprising obstacles and even more surprising and creative ways of navigating those obstacles. 

Can you hear His whisper: “What beauty and meaning are possible for you? Something truly new is possible for you. Bring forth life.”

-Extract from Creative Chaos