New Creation 1

Have you ever felt, when studying and learning the Bible that your head would just explode, and then you'd have to go around for the rest of your life explaining why you've got no head?! That's how I've been feeling the past couple weeks from what I've been learning. It's like things are wizzing around there that want to get out and pretty soon my head will just *pop*

So, I haven't got this all figured out yet and I don't really know what it all means, but here goes. There’s this thing called the “First Mention Principle,” where one way the Jews would interpret scripture was to go back and find the first place a word appears in the scriptures. Well, I've been getting this interesting image appearing from the scriptures lately...

Picture this...in the gospel of John, where Jesus has just resurrected (John 20:15), Jesus asks Mary why she was crying. Before she even turns around and sees Him it says, "Thinking he was the gardener..." And how odd a detail this is! At least to our modern ears and eyes. But when we try to read this as a Jew would in the 1st century I think things clear up a bit. When we use the Principle of First Mention, we are transported all the way back to Genesis to find the first mention of a garden, or gardener.

If we go back to Genesis 2:8 it says, "Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east..." So here we see God in a sense as a gardener, or perhaps more accurately, The Gardener. So there's this strong connection being made in the Jewish mind with Jesus’ resurrection and what God was doing in the first creation. But perhaps it's not quite enough.

And so directly after Jesus talks to Mary, he appears to his disciples. There is a brief 'catching up' discussion (as is customary when your master rises from the dead) and then in John 20:22 it says, "And with that he breathed on them and said, 'Receive the Holy Spirit.'" Now there's another odd little bit, don’t you think? The whole Jesus breathing on his disciples thing has always confused me. I believe this is another one of those odd details that people tend to gloss over (Can you honestly say you didn't gloss over the breathing part just now? Did you have to reread it to catch the breathing thing?), but I don't think it would have been glossed over by a 1st century Jew reading the text. And I think that a 1st century Jew writing a text (John) who was used to using various methods of interpreting to get to deeper layers of meaning in scripture, may just have put some odd little details in there to provide further layers to the story.

So what do we find if we take a crack at the Principle of First Mention again? It takes us back not only to Genesis again, but to exactly one verse before our last verse from Genesis. In Genesis 2:7 the Bible says, "the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and BREATHED into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being."(Emphasis mine) And so John solidifies the connection here. Just as God, in the original creation, breathed the spirit of life into the first man, now Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit of God into these first men, His disciples. Isn't that freakin’ awesome!?

Here's something else...think about how the order of events play out in the whole passion narrative of Jesus compared to the order of creation. Jesus dies on Friday (the 6th day of the week), that is to say that He completes God's work of redemption. On Saturday (the 7th day), the Sabbath, the Shabbat, God rests. There's this sort of disquieting, uncomfortable, yet exciting silence over creation. Then early on Sunday morning, the first day of a new week, Christ raises from the dead. He becomes the first to be resurrected and perhaps this is not just the first day of a new week, but the first day of a New Creation!

And so maybe what John is implying by these links between the first creation and Jesus’ resurrection is that Jesus’ resurrection was somehow like a NEW creation. Maybe Jesus’ resurrection wasn’t just for the forgiveness of our sins, but also the redemption (or restoration) of the world through this new creation. I’m not saying, by the way, that the resurrection was anything LESS than forgiveness, but maybe it is MORE than that.

Like I said, I don't really know what this all means but maybe it does have some implications for us. Maybe it means that our focus shouldn't just be on getting out of this life and this world so we can get to some other world (heaven). Maybe that's not God's plan. After all, Revelation does end with God and heaven crashing into earth (Rev. 21). It says He's going to dwell with US, not vise versa.

Jesus thought we should pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” What would it look like if He really meant that? And I think this makes some sense in light of Jesus' view that eternal life seemed to begin here and now, not after we die. Maybe it has implications for how we focus on the times we're in.

We always tend to look at it as 'we're living in the LAST days of END of time.' That's certainly a valid way of looking at it. But maybe we could be thinking of it more in terms of living in the FIRST days of a NEW creation. Maybe that would affect how we live out God's kingdom on earth.

I heard recently that some people who study world economics believe that with the wealth we have in the world we could end extreme poverty in the world. End it...done...over. Extreme poverty is sometimes defined as the type of poverty that kills. People without enough basic medicine, shelter, food, water. And our generation could end it. Just like we look back on the generations of people who justified slavery through the scriptures, I wonder if 200 years from now people will look back on our generation and see how we really missed the boat. Or if they'll look back on us and see a generation that figured it out, stepped up, and did it.

Kaboom,