Jesus "alive and at large in the world"

Friday in the Octave of Easter, not an ordinary Friday. For starters, I had bacon for breakfast. The Easter Octave is a feast, not a fast.

While I am interested in any and all thoughtful theological "takes" on Christ's resurrection, when you get right down to it, based on scripture (the Gospels and Saint Paul especially) I am inclined conceive of it quite literally. In other words, I believe in a physical resurrection, which I confess each time I say the Creed: "I believe in... the resurrection of the body and life everlasting." Obviously, the Gospel writers go to great lengths to explain that Jesus' immediate resurrection presence is a physical, bodily presence. Now, I realize this sounds pretty limited. Left at that it is pretty limited, too limited.

Christ's Resurrection, designed by Giulio Romano and woven under the guidance of Pieter van Aelst, ca. 1520s

For help in expanding this concept of resurrection, I turn to the first part of a lecture Rowan Williams gave to the clergy of the Anglican Diocese of Winchester in 2008 when he was still serving as the Archbishop of Canterbury. What follows is what Williams takes to be "the bottom line in belief in the New Testament about the resurrection"-

to believe in his resurrection is to believe in Jesus – in the great phrase of John Masefield, 'alive and at large in the world'; Jesus set free, he's not going to die, nothing prevents him acting, he is always going to be active and not passive, always at work. And so, to say he is risen, is to say he is now free to act eternally, unceasingly, without limit. Death and its effects cannot hold him back. It's not only, then, that we are brought into the new age, brought into this final phase of human history. That final phase is shaped, controlled by the liberty of Jesus. To say he is risen is to say he is free to act. Wherever we are now in human history, after the resurrection, Jesus is active

While this all sounds very nice, it isn't often easy to see that since his resurrection Jesus is active in history. I would offer Williams' book Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel as offering some deep insights into just how Jesus resurrected is active in the world.

One clue is given in the first chapter of Acts when walking with him to where he is going to ascend, the Lord is asked by his followers, "are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?" (Acts 1:6) In other words, apart from its global, even cosmic scope, Jesus' modus operandi doesn't really change after his Ascension and the descent of the Holy Spirit- the Holy Spirit being the one through whom he acts post-resurrection. In other words, he does not become a superhero. To paraphrase from the Book of Isaiah, Jesus' ways are not our ways.

It is of the essence of being a Christian for me to make Jesus' ways my ways. Until that happens, I won't be able to see just how present and active he is that he is, in reality, "alive and at large in the world."

Our Friday traditio is a strange one- "Blessed Easter" by Holger Czukay.