Here are a few contrasting images about eternal life from William Willimon.
Immortality is attractive because it acts as if eternality is something that we possess as human beings. Resurrection is humbling because it is pure gift to utterly mortal beings like us. Immortality usually assumes continuity in the next life with this life - if we enjoyed rose gardening in this life, we'll get to garden in the next. Resurrection promises a whole new world, a radical discontinuity with the pain and frustration of life in this world, discontinuity that occurs because wee are now near God in a healed, restored, wonderfully refashioned world.
This makes resurrection available today - now. It is the life that breaks through what is now at hand for us and takes us along a new path. Thus, resurrection brings eternal life right into the present and promises to make it a part of what will also come. It is not something for which we wait. It busts into now and never stops busting in to transform and bring to life something new. Rather then waiting - we enter eternal life and the life we enter is not under our control. It is new...it is not like Lazarus brought back to his life as it was before he died and was buried. It is new as it takes the ways of life we find comforting and discomforting and liberates us to move in a new direction that will bring us more fully into the promises of our God.
Connection: Don't expect that today will be just like all the others. We are followers of Jesus and that means we will be a resurrected people who know what it is to be in the tomb and we can expect that the next moment the stone will be rolled away and we will begin living within the embrace of the resurrection. How will the resurrection tickle you today?
Bring us into your life, O God. Free us from the way we want to control eternity and teach us to open our arms to greet the blessed surprise that is the power of resurrection you promise for all your beloved. Amen.
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