N. T. Wright’s most recent book dropped this week.  The Day the Revolution Began focuses on the death of Jesus.  One of the questions Wright tackles early in the book is the question of the revolution’s content.  From the book’s first chapter:

It wasn’t just that they believed Jesus had been raised from the dead.  They did believe that, of course, and that too was scandalous nonsense in their day as it is in ours.  But they quickly came to see his resurrection not simply as an astonishing new beginning in itself, but as the real result of what had happened three days earlier.  The resurrection was the first visible sign that the revolution was already underway.  More signs would follow.

That’s one of Wright’s strengths, really, the way he paints the picture of what early Christianity looked like.  That’s significant, because what we think today can seem so different from, almost diametrically opposed to, that early view.  Wright continues:

Most Christians today don’t see it like this– and, in consequence, most people outside the church don’t see it like that either.  I understand why.  Like most Christians today, I started my thinking about Jesus’ death with the assumption, from what I had been taught, that the death of Jesus was all about God saving me from my “sin,” so that I could “go to heaven.”  That, of course, can be quite the revolutionary idea for someone who’s never through of it before.  But it’s not quite the revolution the early Christians were talking about.  In fact, that way of putting it, taken on its own, significantly distorts what Jesus’s first followers were saying.  They were talking about something bigger, something more dangerous, something altogether more explosive.  The personal meaning is not left behind . . . But it is contained within the larger story.  And it means more, not less, as a result.

That’s the tension I’ve lived in over my time as a teacher: how to leave room for the personal dimension while also reminding students and teachers of that larger story.  I liken it to the cart (the personal story) and the horse (the bigger picture of what God is doing).  The only thing more frustrating that delineating the differences is what Christians refuse to genuinely talk about both realities.

I’m still early in the book.  I am hopeful that I will learn good things from Wright, even if I am ultimately taken back to the place where I began (only different from the journey).  I imagine I’ll be quoting more from the book as I make my way through it.

(image from harpercollins.com)