Resurrection and NT Wright

A family in our parish recently sent us a beautiful letter. After groping for words of comfort, this lovely family ended with "We have no words of comfort for you except 'Christ is risen!' ". Another dear friend who was present the night Chloe died posted some great insights on his blog. He said that in some ways death is harder to deal with as a Christian. His reason was that for a Christian we deeply understand the injustice of death. We know this is not the way it is "supposed to be". Death is not just a natural end in the "circle of life" and it is simply not beautiful. Anyone who was at our house the night Chloe died knows it is the ugly, present triumph of evil over good. Death is not just a person shedding off this old worn out coat and going "to a better place". It is the demonic destruction of God's creation. It is the fullest manifestation of sin's effects on God's world.
So how are Christians to relate to death? Certainly not with hopeless, crippling despair. This would demonstrate a woeful lack of belief that God keeps His promises to His children. But an equally wrong response is to shrug off death and grief with the justification that "she is in heaven. We should be happy". More and more I see this as religious escapism and a form of gnosticism. Actually "she" is not completely in heaven. Her body is rotting under the ground. To look at my beautiful baby and determine that her soul is more important than her body and therefore ignore the ugly reality of her body's current condition is to ignore the truth that Christ's resurrection was a bodily resurrection. His redemptive work was complete only when He rose from the dead. Chloe does not get a free pass. Her redemption will not be complete until she bodily raises from the dead. And here is where the life of faith really collides with this material, rationalist world. Do I stand by Chloe's grave and weave happy stories of her running around in heaven, bouncing on her grandpa's knee. Do I comfort myself by imagining her picking flowers while angels float around her playing harps? While this may give me a degree of peace I do not think it meets the requirements of hope. Hope is not wishful thinking. It is the strong conviction that Chloe's story is not completed and that the present reality (that we MUST be honest about in all its horror) is not the final word . Her "3 days in the grave" are not over but they will come to a glorious end. God's redemptive plan is for her physical body just as it was for Christ's body-restoration, an undoing of sin's decay. The Christian's response is nothing short of declaring that that body will come out the the grave, stand whole and perfect on this earth. That is admittedly a little harder than saying "she is happy and in a better place." But it rings truer.
One of the ways that God provedentially prepared me for Chloe's death (I believe) was in my reading of NT Wright's book "Surprised by Hope". Long before I even knew Chloe was sick I had been interested in what I felt was the paradox of loving the physical world and "believing in heaven". I just couldn't figure out why there seemed to be so much redeeming value to art, nature, human endeavor and yet supposedly (at least in Western protestant teaching) that was all going to some day be scrapped and we would all be zapped up to heaven. This book turned out to be a good corrective to that view as well as essential preparation to dealing with Chloe's death. I read this book before become Orthodox and I found in the Orthodox church this belief solidly central. I highly recommend this book to anyone. This is also a good segway to my next post. Many of you are interested in hearing why I joined the Greek Orthodox faith. I am currently on page 5 of "My Journey" and am still hanging out with the Presbyterians:) Obviously I have some summarizing to do before posting!