Came across what I thought was a great section while reading Surprised By Hope yesterday! Sometimes NT Wright can write in an extremely academic way, sometimes I even have to stop and look up a word! Anyway, in this selection Wright says it as plain as day:

Who after all, was it who didn’t want the dead to be raised? Not simply the intellectually timid or the rationalists. It was, and is, those in power, the social and intellectual tyrants and bullies; the Caesars who would be threatened by a Lord of the world who had defeated the tyrants last weapon, death itself; the Herods who would be horrified at the postmortem validation of the true King of the Jews. And this is the point where believing in the resurrection of Jesus suddenly ceases to be a matter of inquiring about an odd event in the first century and becomes a matter of rediscovering hope in the twenty-first century. Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word. The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to transform the world.

Pg. 75

Wow! I almost wanted to add an exclamation mark at the end there! There is just so much in that quote to get excited about; the hope of justice, the hope of liberation, but most of all the hope that we can transform the world because of Jesus!

Transformation of the world is a much different thing than progress in the world. Progress tends to forget the mess that has come before and blindly look toward the future somewhere. Transformation is about a new thing from an old thing. Transformation is about taking something and redeeming what was wrong before in order to have something that is much more beautiful than what existed before. This is a tough, if not impossible, concept to understand without the hope that comes when one understands the resurrection of Jesus.

This topic makes me think of the current political campaign and the use of the words “hope” & “change.” I don’t think that the people that are using those words all of the time in their speeches and plastered on their signs really know what they are saying. Hope and change (transformation) do not come through a government or even a person. Hope and transformation comes to the world only by Jesus and then through a community that truly grasps the meaning of the resurrection.

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