Alleluiah! Christ is risen!

There are many ways to think about “life after death.” A favorite American way is to avoid thinking about it all.

Another favorite American way is often featured in the fake funerals shown in film and TV. These often lean to the idea that “you only go ‘round once in life.” This is all there is. So the goal of life is to get as much joy as you can now, for there isn’t any more to be had. Hopefully one will be mourned and remembered by those one leaves behind, so that one might “live on” in the hearts of loved ones.

Many cultures in the past imagined that one literally left this world and went to another world. One was said to voyage to the other shore, or to pass on to a better place, or to have entered the celestial realm, or to have gone to the stars, or to have gone to the underworld.

These cultural images appear so often even in Christian songs, talk, artwork, sermons and funerals that the average Christian assumes that this is what Christian theology claims. These images are so deeply entrenched in our culture that what Christian theology really claims may shock the average Christian.

What Christianity claims is that rather than going somewhere else when we die (eg., heaven), the world is being made new already, right here and now. Rather than our praying that we would go to the Kingdom, we pray “thy Kingdom come.” We don’t fly off the New Jerusalem, rather the New Jerusalem comes to earth. And one day, we all will rise to live in this same world -- made fully new.

Jesus didn’t “go to heaven” when he died. On the third day he was resurrected. He rose from the dead. He walked, talked, blessed, ate, cooked, and functioned astonishingly well on earth in a raised, physical body. Only then did he say he was off to prepare dwelling places, and then would return — here. Jesus was but the first to be raised, the first part of the making new of all things on this planet.

The life, words and acts of Jesus were just the beginning of the Kingdom’s coming. His resurrection was the “first fruit,” the beginning of the Great Harvest. Easter is about so much more than Jesus’ victory over his own death. It is his victory over the death of the world. The Light of the World has come… and the world is being enlightened. Rather than waiting for the future… we discover the future here and now.

The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!