One of the themes we recently picked up on over Easter was that the whole of history is death and resurrection shaped because it is centred on, points to and is shaped by the death and resurrection of Jesus. This means that our lives are death and resurrection shaped too. This is both in the big sense, that we die to our old self to rise to new life in Christ. It also means that our lives are full of mini death and resurrection moments. This applies to us individually and more corporately as members of families and churches.
With that in mind, I think an important encouragement for each of us is that “sometimes it is Saturday.” This is true in the big picture sense. Yes, we live the other side of Jesus’ death and resurrection but we are still in the now and the not yet, we look forward to our great resurrection day to come both individually and as part of the whole creation. It will often be the case that this is where we find ourselves in those individual micro stories too.
We spend a lot of out time between Friday and Sunday. We look back and see that whatever it was that had to die has died. We’ve said goodbye to something. There’s been mourning and grieving. This might mean that we’ve had to let go of something good that could have become an idol or it could mean that we have been brought to the place of confessing sin, seeing it as ugly and saying that we want to be free from it. This may be true as we think about others we are walking alongside too. Yet, it still doesn’t feel like resurrection. There isn’t a sense of restoration, we haven’t grasped the new thing God has for us, We are a long way from joyful celebration.
It’s okay to recognise that we are still at Saturday and I think this is a sense in which we can talk about “Sunday’s coming”. It’s okay to say that I have hope, I trust God but I’m not going to claim that the prayer is answered or the victory won yet. Indeed, when we do that too early, we are left with victories that are too small! We aren’t going to put that person on a pedestal to be knocked off of because we don’t know the end of their story. Nor are we going to write them off as a hopeless cause for the same reasons. Instead we are going to express patient hope in the Lord, that he is the one who brings life out of death, resurrection after burial in his time and in his way.
Faithroots 