Following on yesterday’s post…How huge is what we’re about to remember on Sunday?
If true, the resurrection would have meant to beholders that God is finally revealed in his chosen Son. The promised kingdom is already appearing! It is a tenet of Hebraic historical logic that if the Messiah is risen, then God is unstoppably revealed, for only at the end of history is the meaning of history knowable.
The end of history is in a sense already present in Jesus’ rising from the dead. The general resurrection is foretasted in Jesus’ resurrection. In this way, Jesus’ divinity is implied from his resurrection (Romans 1:4). If risen, then Son of Man, Son of God.
All who shared the expectation of a general resurrection felt themselves grasped by the end time in the living presence of the risen Jesus. They acquired an incredibly confident and otherwise implausibly courageous attitude toward history, suffering, and life’s ambiguities. Why was the New Testament community so confident about the historical process? Because in Jesus’ resurrection, the end was already beheld. The resurrection is thus the clue to the whole of history, through which God is finally made known.
–Thomas Oden, Classic Christianity