Easter 2: Living the New Creation

Acts 4:32-35


Psalm 133


1 John 1:1-2:2


John 20:19-31

On Easter Day we contemplated the resurrection of Christ as nothing like an ending – happy or otherwise – but instead a beginning, marking the first event, on the first day, of a new creation.  Today we can see how the writer of the first letter of John reflects this by placing the resurrection – the start of this new creation – within the context of the first by using imagery from the Genesis narrative.  The author opens the letter by saying:  “We declare to you what was from the beginning,” and immediately the minds of the original readers – and our own – go to that first verse in Genesis: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth…” (Genesis 1:1)  Equally, the author evokes images of first day of the first creation by using the language of light and darkness: “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5b)  Here, our minds – as might the minds of the original readers – go again to those first verses in Genesis:  “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.  And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness” (Genesis 1:1-2);  equally our minds may go to the resurrection story itself, when “early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark” (John 20:1) the women came to the tomb only to discover that the light of God – the light of life – had conquered the darkness of death and the tomb.

Yes, the language in the first letter of John – written early in the second century – is chosen and crafted in such a way as to bring its readers to contemplate the resurrection as the beginning of something new, but at the same time uses the language of beginning to encourage his community, which had been experiencing internal conflict and turmoil, to begin to think beyond the beginning.  The writer urges them to think as to how the resurrection life which God has inaugurated in Christ and into which they had entered in baptism is to be expressed; and how by their lives they are to enable and continue the new creation already begun.  Unlike the first creation in which God himself brought all things to completion, and human beings were told simply to tend it and behave themselves, the new creation will require human beings to help bring it to completion.  But how?  By the community of those who have been brought into Christ’s resurrected life, that is the Church, witnessing to the the new creation in their lives and in their mode of living.  So, in the first verses of the epistle the writer stresses unity in fellowship.  If Christians cannot be joined to each other in fellowship, how is the world ever to believe that they are joined to God in the same?  If there is no unity in the most basic of beliefs among Christians, or if the bulk of their time appears devoted to in-house wranglings, or – worse still – if one faction feels their sense of being correct gives them the right to be rude, unkind or cruel, how is the world to believe that a new creation grounded in love and self-sacrifice has begun?  If Christians cannot be reconciled in fellowship one to another, how are they to make known God’s own reconciliation of the world to himself? (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:18)  Certainly, the writer of 1 John recognizes that the creation is not complete, and that even we who have been baptized and joined to Christ still will lose our way, that we will still damage ourselves and the community, that we sin; but in doing points out that sin not what ultimately undermines fellowship.  Instead, it is our unwillingness to recognize and accept the fact that we do sin.  In short, it is our hubris and hypocrisy which undermines fellowship: “If we say that we have fellowship with [God] while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another….If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” (1 John 1:6, 7a, 8)  The letter begs the question, if we as the Church are unwilling to be honest about the darkness and sin in ourselves, how will we ever be able to convince the world of God’s truth and compassion, how will we ever be able to escape the accusation of self-righteousness?

This idea of fellowship – in Greek koinonia (yes, that’s what it more or less means) – is at the heart of the Johaninne theology; but, more importantly, it is at the heart of the new creation revealed in Jesus’ resurrection.  In the life, death and most markedly in the resurrection of Jesus, God breaks down all divisions between the human and the divine; God forges a new fellowship with human beings, forges a new creation.  In the second letter to the Corinthians Paul writes that “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself.” (2 Corinthians 5:19a), but that’s not the whole story, because he goes on to say that having reconciled us to himself through Christ, he has “given us the ministry of reconciliation…and [entrusted] the message of reconciliation to us, [making us]…ambassadors for Christ”. (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:18-20)  The fellowship – or as koinonia can better rendered, “communion by intimate participation” – which ought to exist among Christians, is the result of knowing deeply the truth that we are a new creation, reconciled with God.  The koinonia which ought to exist among Christians should be blatantly obvious to the the world by the ways in which Christians care one for the other, for example as depicted in the morning’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles: “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold…and distributed the proceeds to all, any had need.” (Acts 3:34, 2:44b)  That koinonia is to be obvious by the ways in which Christians are the agents of God’s reconciliation: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” (John 20:23)  That  koinonia is to be obvious by the ways in which we go out into the world in peace, imitating Jesus’ own mission and responding to his instruction: “Peace be with you.  As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’’ (John 20:21)

The Easter event inaugurates a new creation.  The resurrection of Jesus robs death of its power over the created over, and in him God reconciles all things to himself.  It is into this reality into which we are initiated in our baptism, our symbolic death and resurrection, the beginning of our Christian life when God called us “out of darkness into his marvelous light.” (1 Peter 2:9)  In our baptism God enables us to share in the divine fellowship that exists in God’s self, and calls also to reflect that fellowship and reveal the truth of a new creation in the world.  God takes the risk of making us the ambassadors of his vision, of his new but as yet incomplate creation, and therein lies the challenge that should challenge every Christian and every Christian community every day.  If the resurrection is real, then the world will only know it in our resurrected and fearless lives.  If it is true that God is reconciling the world to himself, then the world will only experience it in the lives of peace and forgiveness we live.  If God has indeed inaugurated a new creation in the resurrection of Jesus, then the lives of Christians cannot lazily reflect in the world’s old patterns of thought, or simply dress up the status quo, social constructs and prejudices in a thin veil of Christianity.  No, we must take the new creation seriously, the resurrection seriously, our baptism seriously, our fellowship with God and with one another seriously, and by the lives and witness declare “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life [which has been] revealed to us.”   (1 Johh 1:1, 2)