A Parachute Mine

Imagine being in your garden having afternoon tea while the children play. You see an airplane circling overhead. You watch as it goes round and round for about 30 minutes until a small object is released and slowly descends by parachute. The next thing you hear is a loud explosion. Sixty lives gone in an instant.

If this story sounds familiar, it’s because it in fact happened in our village. In November 1940, a parachute mine was dropped on the village during the war, killing 60 soldiers.^[1] Their memory and names are preserved on the war memorial in the back of the village church.^[2] We remember them every year on Remembrance Day. We remember, but we cannot bring them back. This tension opens up in us a thirst for all things to be put right: for war to be turned into peace, for death to be turned into life.

1 Corinthians 15

In today’s reading from 1 Corinthians, Paul highlights the centrality of resurrection for the Christian faith. At this point in his letter, he is responding to those in Corinth who denied the resurrection of the body; that is, those who maintained that dead people stay dead and there’s no future time when dead people will come back to life. So, if you, too, struggle with this teaching of the Church, then you are neither alone nor the first to question the idea of resurrection in general or Jesus’s resurrection in particular.

In reply to this, Paul plants deep historical roots. He provides a list of eyewitnesses to Jesus’s resurrection, many of whom at the time, including Paul, were still alive and could be consulted. On top of this proof, Paul then reasons that without Jesus’s resurrection, the Christian’s faith is in vain. If Jesus hasn’t been resurrected, then all of Paul’s efforts, travels, preaching, teaching, beatings, imprisonments—his life’s work—is all for nothing and we should feel sorry for him. And this is to say nothing of Jesus himself, who in that case would a most cunning liar or trickster.

So, if tomorrow we discover without a shadow of a doubt Jesus’s tomb and that he was not in fact resurrected, then what should our response be? I, for one, would throw in the towel. Like Paul, my faith is built on the historical resurrection of Jesus, without which Christianity no longer makes sense. If Jesus was not physically resurrected from the dead, then he was not who he said he was and we should move on and look elsewhere for a savior. If resurrection isn’t possible, then we ought to all pack it in and call it a day. If Jesus stayed dead, then how much more should Christianity? Close the churches; it’s all a hoax!

But if Jesus was resurrected from the dead, then everything changes. You see, “the church exists only upon the premise and in the power of resurrection.”^[3]

Bird’s Meanings of the Resurrection

Theologian Michael Bird suggests that the resurrection ought to inform and impact us in five ways.^[4]

First, the resurrection is a revelation of Jesus’s identity, and it marks the beginning of the future age. The clocks have been brought forward. At the time of Paul, most Jews looked forward to a resurrection at the end of time, but with Jesus that time had been brought forward. What was expected in the end is happening now, already! A preview of the movie’s ending—a flashforward—is taking place in our time and day. A very example of the life to come had come. This Jesus was in himself the resurrection and the life that they were anticipating. This is like receiving an early present when your birthday is still months away; or a delivery driver arriving a day earlier than expected. Something new and exciting is brought forward in time; something originally reserved for the future changes you here and now. “God’s new day arises in the raising of his Son.”^[5]

Second, resurrection constitutes the inauguration of the new creation. Resurrection is the “first installment” of something new that God is doing.^[6] In the words of Tom Wright, “What creation needs is neither abandonment nor evolution but rather redemption and renewal.”^[7]

Third, resurrection is the objective grounds of salvation. Resurrection completes crucifixion to provide a complete picture of salvation. If Jesus dies a sacrificial death but stays dead, then the job is only half done. Anyone can be punished for sin, but that is not redemption; that is a penalty. Resurrection is when sin and its effects are not just nullified or reversed but broken down into gravel to pave the way to renewal.

Fourth, resurrection creates an experience of the power of Christ’s resurrection flowing into our lives. In this, the Christian bears witness to the fact that:

1. Resurrection life has already begun in our spiritual lives.
2. Resurrection imparts hope.
3. Resurrection imparts a new kingdom perspective and ethics.
4. Resurrection is motivation to press on toward the goal to which we’ve been called.

Lastly, resurrection is an inspiration for kingdom ministry, living out love of God and neighbor. Importantly, resurrection becomes our lens for viewing ourselves, one another, and the world around us.

Stanley Spencer

One person who might just exemplify what it is to view life through a resurrection lens is British painter Stanley Spencer. Throughout many of his paintings runs a theme of resurrection.^[8] He is perhaps best known for painting biblical scenes as if they happened in his home village of Cookham, Berkshire. While he may have thought that his village was almost heaven, surviving the Great War had likely given him a strong desire for his village to be renewed; a desire to see heaven on earth at home, and so he brings the new creation into the present world through his painting.^[9] “He said he wanted to ’take the inmost of one’s wishes, the most varied religious feelings…and to make it an ordinary fact of the street.”^[10]

So, in his painting of “Resurrection, Cookham,” for example, graves in the village churchyard are opened up, his friends are seen milling about peacefully, some boarding a Thames pleasure boat. Spencer also paints in himself and his wife, hanging out in the churchyard with Jesus and the saints while graves open up around them in almost cartoonish fashion.

In another painting, Spencer shows soldiers rising from their graves and handing their white crosses back to Jesus. Experiencing war must have had a profound impact on Spencer, because he wasn’t content to simply remember his fallen comrades, but he wanted to see them resurrected. He wanted to see the flourishing of lives that had been cut short.^[11]

Your Lens

The resurrection of Jesus is not some honorable but dead doctrine; it is a lens to view the world.^[12] “If we are ‘children of the resurrection’ (Luke 20:36), we show the suitability of this name when we are committed to turning our lives into a means of life-giving grace to those around us.”^[13]

This is what Paul experienced. He says, “By the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Cor 15:10). In other words, by the grace of God I am (now) no longer what I once was. He calls himself “unfit to be called an apostle” (1 Cor 15:9). But that was before; that Paul died, a new Paul was resurrected by God’s grace. Like Paul, we may say that by the grace of God I will not be (one day) what I currently am. This is because the grace of God is at work within me (1 Cor 15:10).

So, what is your lens? How will you view the world? How will you paint with the brush of resurrection?

Let resurrection and all that it entails be your lens. What could our villages look like if we viewed them and one another through the grace-filled lens of resurrection? What if we saw hope for one another? What if we didn’t write one another off? What if we were committed to embodying the resurrected Jesus’s ethics in this time and place, here and now?

In Christ’s resurrection, death has been swallowed up. New life and a new way of living have begun.

Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the Lord’s work, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” (1 Cor 15:58 CSB).

Amen.

References

1. “Theydon Bois, Essex. German Parachute Mine. King’s Own Scottish Borderers.,” WW2Talk, n.d., https://ww2talk.com/index.php?threads/theydon-bois-essex-german-parachute-mine-kings-own-scottish-borderers.71359/.

2. “A Company 6th Battalion Kings Own Scottish Borderers WW2,” Imperial War Museums, n.d., https://www.iwm.org.uk/memorials/item/memorial/47604.

3. Michael F. Bird, Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction, 2nd edition. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2020), 504. ↑

4. Bird, Evangelical Theology, 496–504.

5. Bird, Evangelical Theology, 497.

6. Bird, Evangelical Theology, 498.

7. Cited in Bird, Evangelical Theology, 498.

8. Victoria Ibbett, “The Theme of Resurrection in Stanley Spencer’s Work,” Art UK, 28 March 2016, https://artuk.org/discover/stories/the-theme-of-resurrection-in-stanley-spencers-work. ↑

9. Sian Pattenden, “I Love Stanley Spencer,” The Guardian, 6 June 2007, § Art and design, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/artblog/2007/jun/06/ilovespencer. ↑

10. Ian Chilvers and John Glaves-Smith, “Spencer, Sir Stanley,” in A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art (Oxford University Press, 2015). ↑

11. Tate, “’The Resurrection, Cookham’, Sir Stanley Spencer, 1924–7,” Tate, n.d., https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/spencer-the-resurrection-cookham-n04239.

12. Steven J. Kraftchick, “Resurrection,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Theology, ed. Samuel E. Balentine (Oxford University Press, 2015). ↑

13. Bird, Evangelical Theology, 503.