I dove headlong into N.T. Wright’s latest book, Surprised by Hope, which is a good introduction to his theology. As I read, I found myself getting giddy as I read about the Resurrection of Jesus ushering in “not simply a new religious possibility, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation.” I got giddy because my little experience thus far on this earth is finding a track to discover its significance. I got giddy as I pondered the smile of the risen Christ extending his pierced hand to me as an invitation to walk in this new creation life. The more I thought about it, the more I liked this splendid interruption in my desire to live life in a calculated manner of cause and effect. A huge question mark gets painted around this notion of living according to any other sort of narrative. This “newness” that the Resurrection brings is very attractive to me. It sets you into a mood that’s calming and pleasurable. Like holding a newborn baby, or like holding your lover in a reciprocal embrace. I got giddy because these things are quite good things in life that, for the first time, I’m given the gift of experiencing them as signposts that point us toward a greater creation that is to come (and is in fact coming!).

To think of Resurrection, not in terms of bunnies or new dresses, but in terms of something that breaks into your life from the background which, in turn, demands that a new back drop be strung up, becomes a new way of seeing–not through the skeptic’s sneer, but through a lover’s embrace. Life steps into waking Life and you’re suddenly given permission to really live, and to really love. It’s like the margins get reset. Wittgenstein said that “It is love that believes the resurrection.” Bishop Wright takes this to mean that:

“the resurrection is not, as it were, a highly peculiar event within the present world (though it is that as well); it is, principally, the defining event of the new creation, the world that is being born with Jesus. If we are even to glimpse this new world, let alone enter it, we will need a different kind of knowing, a knowing that involves us in new ways, an epistemology that draws out from us not just the cool appraisal of detached quasi-scientific research but also that whole-person engagement and involvement for which the best shorthand is ‘love,’ in the full Johannine sense of agape … Just because it takes agape to believe the resurrection, that doesn’t mean that all that happened was that Peter and the others felt their hearts strangely warmed. Precisely because it is love we are talking about, it must have a correlative reality in the world outside the lover. Love is the deepest mode of knowing because it is love that, while completely engaging with reality other than itself, affirms and celebrates that other-than-self reality.”

[I'm not even sure if I've connected any dots here, but hey, here's for trying...]