New Creation

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, it’s still Easter. Yesterday was only the fourth Sunday of Easter (out of seven).

We’re only half-way through Easter!

The fundamental thing happening at the Resurrection was this: God was ushering in the first part of what would be called the “New Creation”. We usually think of something being “resurrected” as being “brought back”, but what Jesus did was far more than simply moving the clock backwards and rising again. In a sense, he was instead “brought forward.

As my pastor loves to say, “Jesus is God’s future in our present”. Or, as Eugene Peterson put it in The Message translation, Jesus is “leading the resurrection parade” for the rest of us (I’ve always loved that image).

But how do we personally relate to this Resurrection/New Creation now? When I think of “Resurrection” and “New Creation”, what usually comes to my mind is Jesus, the World being glorified, institutions being made just, a bunch of future stuff that I’ll participate in, and my role in ushering in New Creation; I don’t so much think about my participating in it right now in the present.
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This Lent, we’ve been going through a series meditating on some of the implications of the fact that we worship a God who was “slain before the foundations of the world”–in eternity past–and therefore has some aspect of “slain-ness” to his very nature.

In the last couple of posts, we’ve been focusing on what this means for the many references in which the Bible says that the world was created “through Jesus”. What might it mean that the world came into being through a suffering and slain Lord? What might it mean for our own suffering?

This got me thinking about Evolution.

Obviously, the main vehicle driving Natural Selection is death and dying. This is one of the biggest hindrances that Christians have to the idea of Evolution. If our usual categories are correct of a “good” creation “falling”, and only then ushering “death” into the world, how does the thoughtful Christian deal with the realities of Evolution?

I think this Lenten idea of God’s “slain-ness” can help.
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