Easter Sunday - Great Today, Even Better Tomorrow (Eschatology)

Sermon Recap: Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb in darkness and grief, unable to recognize the risen Christ standing before her — until he speaks her name. The sermon's central message is that resurrection isn't merely a theological concept but a deeply personal one: being known, called, and drawn back into the light by the one who loves you. Just as Christ spoke Mary's name through the fog of her grief, he speaks to each of us in our own moments of loss — through people, beauty, Scripture, or sacrament — not to remove our burdens, but to restore our sight and remind us of who we are.

Read/listen to the original sermon here.

Alison Batley Stone, “The New Creation,” collagraph and intaglio print

On the surface, this Easter sermon attempts to tell us some good news about grief — if not a bit ironically. What we see and hear is that Jesus in his resurrected body has something to do with our grief and the power to keep it moving through us. After all, the only healthy way to live with our grief is to let it run its course, to move through us rather than push it down or away.

But then what? Where does all of this lead? What's the point of God being with us in our suffering if this cycle of loss, grief, and renewal is destined to repeat over and again for the rest of eternity?

The simple answer: it isn't. And that is where the theological concept of eschatology meets us.

Simply stated, eschatology is the study of the "last things" (from the Greek éskhatos = last). Put less simply, eschatology concerns itself more broadly with the theology of death, judgement, the final state humankind, and the New Creation promised to us in scripture (most notably in Revelation 21). And most importantly, eschatology is concerned with what serves as the foundation of our central Christian hope: that in the end, God will be with us the way that was always God's hope and dream.

Look! God’s dwelling is here with humankind. He will dwell with them, and they will be his peoples. God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more. There will be no mourning, crying, or pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. (Rev 21:3-5)

A more mystical quality of eschatology is often stated as the already and not yet. And this is where we see Christ's resurrection most theologically clearly in his interaction with Mary at the tomb. Somehow (a term I've grown more comfortable with as the answer to many mysteries) Christ coming back from the dead does something in our present, but it also points to something in our future — something that has not yet fully come to pass. Or maybe said another way: Christ's resurrection gives us immediate access to God's renewing power in this life (i.e. in our grief, weakness, sin, brokenness, etc) while also preparing our souls for the real prize to come: the New Creation.

Heaven and Hell — however you choose to conceptualize them – are, if anything, weigh-stations on the journey to the New Creation. Both will be re- or unmade when Christ returns for the second and final time. And eschatology tells us that even these seemingly final concepts are part of something much larger, spacious, and more promising: the end which is — in reality — a final and new beginning of God's life with creation as it was intended to be.