“How can we learn to live as wide-awake people, as Easter people?” N.T. Wright asks in his book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. Wright maintains that those of us who live with faith in Jesus’ resurrection must make real connections between our bodily lives and our hope that God is going to transform our bodies and all of creation.

The book seeks to unmask various un-Christian ways of thinking about hope. The facts that Jesus was raised from the dead and that our hope is to be made like him mean, in Wright’s analysis, that we have to reject the vague, disembodied hopes that tend to dominate our piety. In the resurrection, God has conquered death and decay. He is making all things new. As Wright and many other theologians argue and have argued, God is transforming the earth itself. As a result, we hope not to be spirited off to heaven, but for God’s victory to be made finally concrete in our lives and on this earth.

Wright seeks to convince his reader that Christian hope is not about going to heaven. Instead, Christian hope is about new creation. Wright wants us to claim God’s promise that death is an enemy that has been conquered. He rejects all sentimentalizing of death, all misguided attempts to suggest that death is a good thing, and he paints, instead, a biblical portrait in which death is what is—a dark and dreadful foe. Death is contrary to what God wants. Christian hope lies, not in embracing death, but in embracing God’s victory over death.

Jesus’ resurrection means both material creation in general and human bodies in particular are included in God’s plan for redemption. Christian hope lies, not in dreams of escape from the body, but in the promise that the body is being and will be redeemed. At every point, Wright highlights the physicality and materiality of the resurrection. The resurrected Jesus is the model for Christian hope for our own bodies. He has been transformed. Some people don’t recognize him.

He moved through locked doors. Yet, this same resurrected Jesus is also clearly physical. He eats fish. He shows his wounds. Wright argues that the gospel witness to Jesus’ resurrection body is “without precedent.”¹ He provides suggestions about the ascension, heaven, and hell that will provoke much thought and discussion. His readers are challenged to allow future hope to become present hope. They are further challenged to allow that present hope to shape their daily, material, physical lives in vibrant ways.

To quote from Wright:  “A good many Easter hymns start by assuming that the point of Easter is that it proves the existence of life after death and encourage us to hope for it. This is regularly, but ironically, combined with a view of that life after death in which the specific element of resurrection has been quietly removed.”² Wright pleads that we take resurrection hope seriously. It is not heaven only but the renewal and transformation of bodies and of earth that is promised in Jesus’ victory over death. “Precisely because the resurrection has happened as an event within our own world, its implications and effects are to be felt within our own world, here and now.”³ He insists that hope for a better world is integral to a gospel that hinges on the resurrection. He draws the conclusion that our work in this world is thus of inestimable value.

Wright’s work sounds a practical call to Christians. We should live the resurrection. The book aims to show Christians that the biblical witness about the resurrection focuses on bodies. Wright helped my students to have their hope shaped by the resurrection. Many moved from hoping for their souls to go to heaven to hoping for their whole selves, body and soul, to be redeemed. They moved from accepting death to rejoicing in God’s victory over it. They moved from thinking of the body as an impediment to spirituality to thinking of the ways their bodies might be used to glorify God.

In reflecting on the resurrection, these students made all kinds of connections between Jesus’ victory over sin and death and their own bodily lives. Through reading Wright, they were able to catch sight of a vision for living in hope. I asked them, “how can we live our faith in the resurrection?”  They answered:

Plant trees
Visit the imprisoned
Have babies
Work for justice
Bake good things
Actively practice the Sabbath
Paint, draw, write, sing
Feed the hungry
Love beauty
Live as physical witnesses in the world that God is victor over death

I asked them, “what would you have thought at the beginning of this class if I had given you this list of ways to practice resurrection faith?” They laughed back at me, and agreed that the list would have seemed nonsensical had Wright not pressed them to think about the ways scripture testifies to God’s resurrection power. Planting trees and baking good things reflect the belief that God redeems space. Working for justice in the material world comes from the confidence that God is redeeming that world, that he cares about it and loves it.

In John Wesley’s sermon, “The More Excellent Way,” he spends most of his time asking folks to think about the ways the most ordinary, mundane aspects of their lives can be offered up to God. He wants his audience to think about how they sleep and how they eat. He wants them to evaluate their little daily habits, the things that entertain them. Wright’s focus on the way resurrection faith claims our bodies makes sense alongside Wesley’s very everyday concerns. Ordinary, daily, physical life is part of the glory of God.

Likewise, we should truly celebrate Easter. Wright calls us to pop the champagne corks, to shout to the sky. In our feasting, we taste the feast to come. In our singing, we hear the eternal songs of glory. He wants to challenge us to think imaginatively and faithfully about how to do this. I confess, I find the challenge…well, challenging. In my home and church this Easter, there was singing and feasting. There were painted eggs and an extravagant cake requested by my preschooler. There was chocolate and other good things. In church, Charles Wesley’s jubilant hymn was sung:

Love’s redeeming work is done, Alleluia!
Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids him rise, Alleluia!
Christ has opened paradise, Alleluia!

However, Wright makes me long for even more celebration. Wilder exultation. Ferocious joy. Unbridled ways of celebrating what God has done. My students have helped me to see what that might look like. I’m grateful to them. I’m also eager for my brothers and sisters in Christ to show me even more.

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¹ N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 55.
² Ibid., 190.
³ 191.

Beth Felker Jones is Assistant Professor of Theology at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.