The ONLY hope is resurrection. If there were no resurrection of Christ, then the cross is a sham. If Christ is not risen then above all men we are the most pitiful. We spend the first half of our lives “getting it all together”, then we spend the next half of life watching it fall apart–especially our bodies. In striving to “hold myself together” I’m building my own image in which there is really no Christ. When I die to my self sustained (illusory) image and realize that I’m falling apart in every way, then a space is made for me to be made into the image of Christ–in exactly the way He imagines me. I recently had an epiphany concerning Ephesians 1:10. From The Message (in the passage Peterson does a much better job than the NIV);
7-10Because of the sacrifice of the Messiah, his blood poured out on the altar of the Cross, we’re a free people—free of penalties and punishments chalked up by all our misdeeds. And not just barely free, either. Abundantly free! He thought of everything, provided for everything we could possibly need, letting us in on the plans he took such delight in making. He set it all out before us in Christ, a long-range plan in which everything would be brought together and summed up in him, everything in deepest heaven, everything on planet earth.
“summed up” is ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι (aorist verb, middle voice of anakephalaioō). Note that it’s root is kephal, “head” or “source” or “origin” with the prefix ana- which means “again”. An aorist verb in Koine denotes punctiliar action–an action or event which happens at a particular point in time–either past, present, or future. “Middle voice” means that the action is done by the subject; the subject of ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι is Christ/God. anakephalaioō means to sum up (again), to repeat summarily, to condense into a summary, briefly comprehend. Jesus has His own “summation” of us; it’s HIS way of “remembering” us; it’s His story of us that He tells in the summing of all things. It isn’t my story about myself that gets told by Christ, but His story about me that is made know to the universe. Because of “therefore there is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus” when my hoped for/expected-by-faith resurrection occurs Jesus will recall me into life in just the way He has determined (lots of “predestinating” in the older translations of Eph. 1) to remember me. When I bring up my personal memories of failure and corruption I would expect Christ to say something like, “Hmm, that isn’t my memory of you. After all, I’ve made all things new (kainos , new in nature, form, substance). Please, let me describe you from my eternal memory, then after that I’d like you to flounce off with me to the party my Father has prepared for us since before the foundations of the Earth.” If Jesus did not rise to life again, then he was just another Galilean Jew killed by the Romans. The resurrection is the proof to the pudding and our only hope.
