Where Do We Go From Here

24 Think “And so, if the resurrection of Jesus means the last days have begun, that also means that after the resurrection there’s never going to be any new framework, any different way of seeing God in the world. This is it. God and the world are now, you might say, settled in the full and final shape of their relationship. The decisive difference has been made. The end has begun. The kingdom has come. Jesus has advanced out of mere history into God’s future. Jesus inhabits God’s future fully, so that we who are drawn to be with Jesus in his resurrection are there with him in the future which has already been inaugurated, so that that in itself opens out onto the perspectives that St Paul more than once mentions, of how the Holy Spirit given to us is the foretaste or the down-payment of God’s future, the age to come. And so, since this is the beginning of the last phase of human history, since the resurrection of Jesus has made the decisive difference, there’s also a sense in which the destinies of all human beings are now bound up with Jesus. From now on, every human being finds who they are, who they may be, where they will be, in relation with the figure of Jesus. The future is in his hand and his resurrection gives him that authority. It’s described again very clearly in Acts 17 in Paul’s sermon in Athens: ‘He has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all by raising him from the dead.’ Once again, the resurrection, the future, the judgement, God’s decisive fixing of his relationship with the world is all connected with Jesus and with Jesus’ resurrection.” RowanWilliams – from ‘Risen Indeed’: The Resurrection in the Gospels