The Christian Hope of the Resurrection
A sermon for the 16th Sunday after Trinity on Ephesians 3:13-21 and Luke 7:11-17
Today’s epistle says that God “is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think according to the power that works in us” (Eph. 3:20). St. Paul was in prison when he wrote this, but he did not want his people to be discouraged by his sufferings. He understood that God was doing bigger things, beyond what we normally think about and pray for.
The gospel illustrates this truth. Jesus and his disciples encountered a funeral procession. As the march to the grave approached the Lord of life, the mourners might have expected Jesus the rabbi to do certain things. He might join the procession, pray for the widow, and offer words of encouragement. He might give financial assistance, as the dead son was likely the widow’s only means of support. But Jesus did something exceeding abundantly above those expectations. He raised the young man from the dead.
This story illustrates the chasm that exists between our expectations of God and what God is actually doing. We have challenges and afflictions. We ask God for comfort and help, which God provides according to his wisdom and providence. But God is doing much more than giving us comfort and help. He is raising us from the dead. He is recreating in the image of his Son. As 2 Corinthians 4:17 says, our “momentary affliction is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.”
It is instructive that an epistle that encourages us to see beyond our normal thoughts and prayers is matched with a gospel that tells us the story of a resurrection. To see what God is really doing, we must understand and embrace our resurrection hope.
Lamentably, most Christians do not understand the hope of resurrection. If you ask typical Christians what they hope for, they will say that they hope to go to heaven when they die. But heaven in this popular sense is what the church calls “The Intermediate State.” This is the state of existence in Christ after physical death but before the resurrection. The New Testament refers to this existence as “paradise” (Lk 23:43), or being “with Christ” (Phil. 1:23), or being “asleep” (1 Thess. 4:13). This is a place of rest, comfort, and anticipation, but it is not a final state.
The Hope of the Resurrection
The Christian hope of resurrection is that Jesus will do for each us what he did for the young man in the gospel. Jesus will command us to “rise.” Jesus will give us new bodies like the body he rose in on Easter Day. But the hope of resurrection is for more than our personal salvation. It includes the whole creation. Jesus will administer true and complete justice. Romans 2:5-6 describes this as “the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, who ‘will render to each one according to his deeds.’" The resurrection will free the world from the cycle of decay and death. As Romans 8:21 says, “The creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”
This hope is proclaimed throughout the New Testament. First Corinthians 15:52 says, “The trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” First Thessalonians 4:16 says, “The Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ shall rise.” Philippians 3:20-21 says, “Our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.”
If we lose sight of our resurrection hope, we reduce our hope to the idea of a perpetual existence in a disembodied state without any connection to the world God created. This reduced hope is not something we can long for as the fulfillment of our deepest desires. It becomes a sort of consolation pride offered in the face of death, an undefined “better place” to which no one really wants to go.
Heaven, in the popular sense, is also selfish. It is a place where we get to escape from the pain of the world without any concern for its suffering or fate. The Bible teaches that we will be saved as part of God’s plan to restore the entire creation to harmony with himself. God will provide his true justice for every person who has ever been wronged. Everyone and everything will experience God’s healing, peace, and joy—except those who refuse to repent and submit to God’s rule. Anything less than this reduces the Christian hope to the satisfaction of our personal desires.
The prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” captures the larger longing implicit in the Christian hope. We want God’s will to be done everywhere and always for every creature. Genuine Christian faith and the love of God which has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Rom 5:5) cannot be content with less than that.
The Good News of the Gospel
The good news, what we call “the gospel,” is that this will all happen. Jesus completed the work of new creation on the cross when he said, “It is finished” (Jn 19:30). On Pentecost, Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to begin the work of new creation within each of us and in the world. Our current tribulations, in Christ, in the Spirit, relate to our future resurrection the way Good Friday related to Easter in the life of Jesus.
This expectant tribulation is the essential experience of life in Christ. Jesus has transformed our pain by uniting it with the cross and turning it into the pathway to resurrection life. Our tribulations are no longer the pain of death that people experience in a dying world. Our sufferings in Christ have become the labor pains of God’s new creation.
This is the reason we must never lose sight of our resurrection hope. We “look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” As Jesus said in John 5:28-29, “The hour in coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come forth, those who have done the good to the resurrection of life.” For God “is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think according to the power that works in us.”
