The Disciples Meet Jesus

Overview

Jesus Christ is teaching us in this passage about the nature of the resurrection, that if we believe in him there’s a future for us. He says there’s a resurrection in the future we wait for and there’s a resurrection in the present we can experience now. It’s an understanding of both of those that radically shaped the early Christians, and it’s a disorientation to those that’s behind the fact that the Christian church looks different from that today.

The concept of the resurrection of the future that Jesus talked about is revolutionary. It’s paradigm-busting, but it’s only an intellectual concept. It’s only the knowledge of something in the future, and it isn’t operative in our lives unless the knowledge of the future resurrection becomes operative through the experience of a present resurrection, a spiritual resurrection now. So let’s look at those two.