Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

by N.T. Wright

The beauty of the present world, I suggested earlier in the book, has something about it of the beauty of a chalice, beautiful in itself but more hauntingly beautiful in what we know it’s meant to be filled with; or that of the violin, beautiful in itself but particularly because we know the music it’s capable of. Another example might be the engagement ring, which is meant as it is to delight the eye but which is meant even more to delight the heart

because of what it promises.

And we should never forget that when Jesus rose from the dead, as the paradigm, first example, and generating power of the whole new creation, the marks of the nails were not just visible on his hands and his feet. They were the way he was to be identified. When art comes to terms with both the wounds of the world and the promise of resurrection and learns how to express and respond to both at once, we will be on the way to a fresh vision, a fresh mission.

neither sentimentality nor brutalism will do, but only eschatology in the process of being realized.

Art at its best draws attention not only to the way things are but also to the way things will be, when the earth is filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.

God gloriously honors all kinds of ways of announcing the good news. I do not suppose for a moment that my own way of preaching or talking to individuals about God is perfect and without flaws, and yet God (I believe) has graciously honored some at least of what I do.

The first time I preached a proper sermon, my mentor gave me some good advice:

your praying and your preaching should be of the same length. You don’t want to find yourself limping, with one leg shorter than the other. God works as a result of prayer and faithfulness, not technique and cleverness.

the powers of evil have been defeated, that God’s new world has begun. This announcement, stated as a fact about the way the world is rather than as an appeal about the way you might like your life, your emotions, or your bank balance to be, is the foundation of everything else.

But how can the church announce that God is God, that Jesus is Lord, that the powers of evil, corruption, and death itself have been defeated, and that God’s new world has begun? Doesn’t this seem laughable? Well, it would be if it wasn’t happening. But if a church is working on the issues we’ve already looked at—if it’s actively involved in seeking justice in the world, both globally and locally, and if it’s cheerfully celebrating God’s good creation and its rescue from corruption in art and music, and if, in addition, its own internal life gives every sign that new creation is indeed happening, generating a new type of community—then suddenly the announcement makes a lot of sense.

with the death and resurrection of Jesus himself. And in terms of the big picture of new creation, which we have been drawing throughout, what we must say is this: such a person is a living, breathing little bit of “new creation”—that new creation that has already begun to happen in Jesus’s resurrection and that will be complete when God finally makes his new heavens and new earth and raises us to share in that new world.

But to think in terms of a new creation avoids the problem of supposing for a moment that one could forget earth and concentrate on heaven.

Seeing evangelism and any resulting conversions in terms of new creation means that the new convert knows from the start that he or she is part of God’s kingdom project, which stretches out beyond “me and my salvation” to embrace, or rather to be embraced by, God’s worldwide purposes.

To speak, rather, of Jesus’s lordship and of the new creation, which results from his victory on Calvary and at Easter, implies at once that to confess him as Lord and to believe that God raised him from the dead is to allow one’s entire life to be reshaped by him, knowing that though this will be painful from time to time, it will be the way not to a diminished or cramped human existence but to genuine human life in the present and to complete, glorious, resurrected human life in the future. As with every other aspect of new creation, there will be surprises on the way. But Christian ethics will only gain from being understood as one expression of Christian hope.

to foster hope at any and every level. And part of the argument of this book is that when this is done, this is not something other than the surprising hope of the gospel, the hope for life after life after death. It is the direct result of that: the hope for life before death.

And when people cease to be surrounded by beauty, they cease to hope. They internalize the message of their eyes and ears, the message that whispers that they are not worth very much, that they are in effect less than fully human.

The church, because it is the family that believes in hope for new creation, should be the place in every town and village where new creativity bursts forth for the whole community, pointing to the hope that, like all beauty, always comes as a surprise.

“Jesus is raised, just as he told you he would be; in other words, all that he said about the coming of the kingdom through his own work, through his death and resurrection, has come true.”

What remains implicit in Mark, at least as we have it, is made explicit in Matthew: resurrection doesn’t mean escaping from the world; it means mission to the world based on Jesus’s lordship over the world.

So Matthew gives us the clear message of what the resurrection means: Jesus is now enthroned as the Lord of heaven and earth. His kingdom has been established. And this kingdom is to be put into practice by his followers summoning all nations to obedient allegiance to him, marking them out in baptism. The closing line draws together the major themes of the gospel: the Emmanuel, the God-with-us, is now Jesus-with-us until the final end of the old age, the time when the new age, which has been inaugurated in the resurrection, has completed its transforming work in the world.

Without the resurrection, the story is an unfinished and potentially tragic drama in which Israel can hold on to hope but with an increasing sense that the narrative is spinning out of control. Without the resurrection, even the story of Jesus is a tragedy, certainly in first-century Jewish terms, as the two on the road to Emmaus knew very well. But with the resurrection there is a new way of telling the entire story. The resurrection isn’t just a surprise happy ending for one person; it is instead the turning point for everything else. It is the point at which all the old promises come true at last: the promises of David’s unshakable kingdom; the promises of Israel’s return from the greatest exile of them all; and behind that again, quite explicit in Matthew, Luke, and John, the promise that all the nations will now be blessed through the seed of Abraham.

But if Jesus has been raised, then this is how the Old Testament has to be read: as a story of suffering and vindication, of exile and restoration, a narrative that reaches its climax not in Israel becoming top nation and beating the rest of the world at its own game but in the suffering and vindication, the exile and restoration, of the Messiah—not for himself alone but because he is carrying the saving promises of God. If the messenger bringing vital news falls into the river and is then rescued, he is rescued not for himself alone but for the sake of those who are waiting in desperate hope for his life-giving message.

If Jesus is raised, Luke is saying, he really was and is the Messiah; but if he’s the Messiah, he is God’s messenger, God’s promise-bearer, carrying the promises made to Abraham, Moses, David, and the prophets—promises not only for Israel but also for the whole world.

John has so ordered his gospel that the sequence of seven signs, climaxing in the cross of Jesus on the sixth day of the week and his resting in the tomb on the seventh, functions as the week of the old creation; and now Easter functions as the beginning of the new creation.

The Word through whom all things were made is now the Word through whom all things are remade.

Mary supposes Jesus is the gardener; that’s the right mistake to make because, like Adam, he is charged with bringing God’s new world to order. He has come to uproot the thorns and thistles and to plant myrtle and cypress instead, as Isaiah promised in his great picture of the new creation that would result from the Word of God coming like rain or snow into the world.4

to be Jesus’s agents in the world, his followers need, and are given, his own Spirit. Easter and Pentecost belong together. Easter commissions Jesus’s followers for a task; Pentecost gives them the necessary equipment to accomplish it.

that. What we are called to, and what in the resurrection we are equipped for, is a knowing in which we are involved as subjects but as self-giving, not as self-seeking, subjects: in other words, a knowing that is a form of love.

But if we only try to do alongside others what they are doing already, we will miss the really significant task. As with Isaiah’s vision in the Temple, and many other scenes both biblical and modern, Peter’s change from fisherman to shepherd comes through his facing of his own sin and his receiving of forgiveness, as Jesus with his three-times-repeated question goes back to Peter’s triple denial and then offers him forgiveness precisely in the form of a transformed and newly commissioned life.

Those who don’t want to face that searching question and answer may remain content to help the world with its fishing. Those who find the risen Jesus going to the roots of their rebellion, denial, and sin and offering them love and forgiveness may well also find themselves sent off to be shepherds instead. Let those with ears listen.

There could not be a much clearer statement of intent: the kingdoms of the world are now claimed as the kingdom of Israel’s God, and of his Messiah.

This is what the resurrection does: it opens the new world, in which, under the saving and judging lordship of Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, everything else is to be seen in a new light.

It is, rather, the decisive start of the worldwide rule of the Jewish Messiah, in which sins are already forgiven and the promise of the eventual new world of justice and incorruptible life are assured.

The revolutionary new world, which began in the resurrection of Jesus—the world where Jesus reigns as Lord, having won the victory over sin and death—has its frontline outposts in those who in baptism have shared his death and resurrection. The intermediate stage between the resurrection of Jesus and the renewal of the whole world is the renewal of human beings—you and me!—in our own lives of obedience here and now.

Part of the central achievement of the incarnation, which is then celebrated in the resurrection and ascension, is that heaven and earth are now joined together with an unbreakable bond and that we too are by rights citizens of both together.

Heaven and earth, I repeat, are made for each other, and at certain points they intersect and interlock. Jesus is the ultimate such point. We as Christians are meant to be such points, derived from him. The Spirit, the sacraments, and the scriptures are given so that the double life of Jesus, both heavenly and earthly, can become ours as well, already in the present.

Come alive to the real world, the world where Jesus is Lord, the world into which your baptism brings you, the world you claim to belong to when you say in the creed that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead.

It is perhaps not surprising that they have largely failed because in fact the sacraments are designed to be their own language, ultimately untranslatable, even though we can describe what is going on from various angles, themselves all inadequate.

If, then, the church is to be renewed in its mission precisely in and for the world of space, time, and matter, we cannot ignore or marginalize that same world. We must, rather, claim it for the kingdom of God, for the lordship of Jesus, and in the power of the Spirit so that we can then go out and work for that kingdom, announce that lordship, and effect change through that power.

Living between the resurrection of Jesus and the final coming together of all things in heaven and earth means celebrating God’s healing of his world not his abandoning of it; God’s reclaiming of space as heaven and earth intersect once more; God’s redeeming of time as years, weeks, and days speak the language of renewal; and God’s redeeming of matter itself, in the sacraments, which point in turn to the renewal of the lives that are washed in baptism and fed with the Eucharist.

Baptism is not magic, a conjuring trick with water. But neither is it simply a visual aid. It is one of the points, established by Jesus himself, where heaven and earth interlock, where new creation, resurrection life, appears within the midst of the old.

We do not simply remember a long-since dead Jesus; we celebrate the presence of the living Lord. And he lives, through the resurrection, precisely as the one who has gone on ahead into the new creation, the transformed new world, as the one who is himself its prototype. The Jesus who gives himself to us as food and drink is himself the beginning of God’s new world. At communion we are like the children of Israel in the wilderness, tasting fruit plucked from the promised land. It is the future coming to meet us in the present.

Transcendence, intimacy, celebration, covenant: those are the roots of biblical prayer.

Rather, it has given us the immense privilege of sharing the intimate life of the triune God himself. The Spirit calls from deep within us, calls to the Father, calls from the pain of the world, the pain of the church, the pain of our hearts. And with that call, and with the answering love of the Father, we are, as Paul says, conformed to the image of the Messiah, God’s son (Romans 8:26–30), the one who shared the suffering of the world so that he might be the true intercessor for the world.

“God’s future has come forward to meet you in the present, to transform your present muddled praying into the sharing of his own intimate life, and you’re going to be happy with living in the unredeemed world, untouched by the future that burst into our world at Easter?”

The Bible is thus the story of creation and new creation, and it is itself, through the continuing work of the Spirit who inspired it, an instrument of new creation in human lives and communities.

The resurrection was the full bursting in to this world of the life of God’s new creation; Christian ethics is the lifestyle that celebrates and embodies that new creation. Living out a life of Christian holiness makes sense, perfect sense, within God’s new world, the world into which we are brought at baptism, the world where we are nourished by the Eucharist.

The poem does much, much more: it yearns over the fact that our experience of love, as of everything else that matters, is decidedly incomplete. The way we are now, seen against the way we shall be in God’s design, is only partly what it is meant to be and is emphatically partly not what it is meant to be. But Paul is urging that we should live in the present as people who are to be made complete in the future. And the sign of that completeness, that future wholeness, the bridge from one reality to the other, is love.

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 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 calls 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 by this rule of love will be people who are learning more deeply how to hope.