And now we are at the end of the Nicene Creed and my tour of my favourite bits.
Thank you for coming with me! I hope you’ve gotten something out of it.
I’ll end with my second-favourite line in the Creed: “The life of the world to come. Amen.”
Every Sunday you rattle off out loud that you “look forward to the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”
Let’s pause for a moment. Do you look forward to the resurrection of the dead?
Really? Have you ever given it a moment’s thought?
Remember how I asked you earlier to shift the emphasis in the Creed to a full-blooded statement of “I” when it crops up?
Next time you say it, let’s scare those people in the pew in front of you again: “I look forward to the resurrection of the dead!”
There’s some great artwork on this over-the-top event. I love Stanley Spencer’s “The Resurrection, Cookham.”
In this painting, he shows what he thought the Cookham village church graveyard would look like on the day of the great resurrection. It’s delightfully weird and prosaic at the same time.
But there are also plenty of horror movies that deal with the resurrection of the dead in a less than positive way.
Very few of us would really look forward to it if it involved zombies (even our Aussie Catholic theologian Matthew Tan, who wrote a book about it).
But the bit I’d really like to focus on today is “the life of the world to come.” I am increasingly in love with this belief, and I want you to be as well.
It’s a recreated earth, made perfect again. A new heaven and a new earth, where God lives with us in person.
We were created to live on earth as human beings with bodies and souls in perfect unity.
In the new earth, there are animals and plants, and perfect peace between them and us, and them and each other.
We were the cause of all the trouble in this world. But in the life of the world to come, we are allowed back into paradise on earth because the damage has all been swept away.
Everything has been remade in perfection, including us. This time, we literally can’t break it again.
Jesus’ resurrection showed us the prototype new human body and what it’s capable of when it lives on earth. Now all we have to do is follow him through death to find it.
I promise you that one day, you will be resurrected. You will see God with your own eyes in your own flesh, as Job told us (Job 19:25-26).
You will see other people who you know. You will see God. You will see everyone.
You will be present at the final judgement, where once and for all, the whole mess is going to be sorted out.
If you have turned to God and opened your heart and your mind to him in love—if you have offered him your worries, your gratitude, your trust—if you have made him truly welcome in your life—he will welcome you home.
You will live in the new earth with all the other people who made the same choices as you, and who are now in their resurrected bodies.
All will be forgiven and forgotten, and you will truly love those people—quite possibly for the first time ever.
You say every Sunday, out loud, that you believe this will happen. So maybe start living as if you believed it?
Isn’t it amazing to think that we can start this process now? In fact, it’s exactly what we’re meant to be doing.
We are meant to be looking forward all the time to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
It’s meant to inspire us to greater love of God and our fellow creatures. It’s meant to keep us going when this damaged world is grinding us down.
So if you take nothing else away from this series of articles on the Nicene Creed, take this away.
Start living as if you really believed the promises God has made to us. Really believe in the future and the hope he has offered us if we want it.
It can and will change your life for the better. You’ll start living the life of the world to come right now.
Amen to that.
(PS. If you’re coming to Gleebooks this Sunday afternoon for my Sydney book launch, I look forward to seeing you there!)
