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The End of Death

Jesus Christ, the resurrected—that means that God, in love and omnipotence, makes an end of death and calls a new creation into life.  God gives new life.  “The old has gone.”  See, I am making all things new.”  The resurrection has already broken into the midst of the old world as the ultimate sign of its end and its future, and at the same time as living reality.  Jesus has risen as human; so he has given human beings the gift of resurrection.  Thus human beings remain human, but in a new resurrected way that is completely unlike the old.  To be sure, those who are already risen with Christ will remain, until they reach the frontier of death, in the world of the penultimate to which Jesus came and in which the cross stands.  Even the resurrection does not abolish the penultimate as long as the earth remains; but eternal life, the new life, breaks even more powerfully into earthly lie and creates space for itself within it.  The unity and differentiation of incarnation, cross, and resurrection should be clear.  Christian life is life with Jesus Christ who became human, was crucified, and is risen, and whose word as a whole encounters us in the message of the justification of the sinner by grace.  Christian life means being human in the power of Christ’s becoming human, being judged and pardoned in the power of the cross, living a new lie in the power of the resurrection.  No one of these is without the others.