Jesus--the End and the Beginning

Tracing the Christ-Shaped Nature of Everything

Telford Work

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781540960542
• eBook ISBN: 9781493416974
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Telford Work examines some of the most important ways Jesus is "the omega and the alpha"--the end and the beginning. Jesus alone fulfills the divine purpose for all things, brings about the end of the old world's evil and suffering, and begins eternity's new creation. This core conviction is one of the deepest logics that shapes Christian thinking and life. The author offers a unique, big-picture introduction to how Jesus's life and death shape Christian theology and practice and helps readers fully understand Jesus's transformation of all things.

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Introduction

For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

Colossians 1:19–20

“The Quest is achieved, and now all is over. I’m glad you are here with me, Sam. Here at the end of all things.”1 J. R. R. Tolkien puts these apocalyptic words in Frodo’s mouth just after the destruction of the Ring of Power in The Return of the King. Frodo immediately perceives that everything will change, even his remote and cherished Shire. (The books make that clear. Sadly, the film does not.) With the Ring’s destruction, Middle Earth’s reclamation and restoration are at hand. It takes time to unfold, bringing the demise of elves, dwarves, wizards, and even hobbits, and the rise of “the Age of Men.” Tolkien perceptively reckons the end of the Third Age and the beginning of the Fourth two years later to the day: March 25 on our calendar.

March 25 is the Feast of the Annunciation, the day that commemorates the conception of Jesus Christ as described in Luke 1:26–38, a decisive event at the true end of all things. The annunciation was the moment God invaded his own rebellious world and began to take it back from within. As March 25 began the denouement of Middle Earth’s Third Age and the dawn of its Fourth, so March 25 began, in essence, the Age of the New Adam. All the elements of the old age would still exist—for a while anyway—but totally rearranged, “fall[ing] and rising” (Luke 2:34). Jesus put an end to “all things”—a biblical term for all creation2—and brought a new beginning for them. Do you believe that? You might not. Look out the window, at a newspaper, or even in a mirror. What’s so new? Sadly for Tolkien, “the Age of Men” would prove too depressing to write about. He soon abandoned his attempt to imagine the Fourth Age. Human hearts were the same as before; not enough had changed after all.

When 2 Peter was being written, skeptics were making similar observations. Creation seemed to be creaking along just as before (2 Pet. 3:4). Those skeptics were underestimating Jesus’s transformative power. Countless others have ever since. Even many Christians have traded the apostles’ far-reaching vision of total transformation for the much more modest claim that our souls were all Jesus renewed. Salvation was spiritual, they supposed. The material part of creation hadn’t changed and wouldn’t. Human families, cultures, histories, and politics were not the Lord’s focus and would last only until his return, to then be consigned to the lake of fire or unceremoniously dropped into history’s rubbish heap. This pattern of thinking was powerfully reinforced whenever the mood of the times ran in a pessimistic direction.3

But Christians face an opposite temptation: to overestimate the transformation. The apostles had expected the old world’s kingdoms to topple like dominoes at the Messiah’s coming to “restore the kingdom to Israel” (Acts 1:6). That obviously didn’t happen, as it had not happened in Middle Earth or the Shire. Christians have reconciled themselves to this disappointing development for the most part, but we haven’t entirely abandoned the dream. Our perceptions of Christ’s renewal can get carried away into wishful thinking. When the signs seem to be pointing in the direction of a Christian Rome, a Christian Russia, a Christian America, a Christian Korea or Africa or China, or when the zeitgeist shifts global consciousness toward justice or prosperity or freedom, we who would love to see such breakthroughs can extrapolate the trend too optimistically and imagine the Lord’s hand in it.4

Our day offers plenty of warrants for both pessimism and optimism. One of this book’s purposes is to untangle the apostolic faith from both and to examine Jesus’s transformation of all things for what it really is.5 If you’re turned off by Christian visions that are excessively modest or grandiose, don’t dismiss this one too quickly. I try to be carefully realistic and to put biblical claims about Jesus’s vast ministry in honest conversation with the twenty centuries of often sobering and occasionally intoxicating reality that follow it. To do that in a simple and memorable way, I’ve taken the liberty of inverting a biblical trope.

Jesus—the Alpha and the Omega

In the book of Revelation, the Lord—God the Father and Jesus Christ as well—is described several times as the “alpha” and the “omega.”6 That might be familiar language to you. You might have heard it in sermons, in songs, or in people’s prayers, or you might have seen it on a banner in your church sanctuary. Alpha and omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. So Jesus Christ is the beginning and the end and everything in between.

The Gospel of John begins with the same startling claim that Jesus was in the beginning with God. He’s the alpha. The church had to defend this claim against a heretical school of thought called Arianism, which claimed that only God the Father was the true alpha. Arians considered Jesus the “beta,” so to speak, a second-class deity whom the only true God created and then worked with to create everything else. Fourth-century church leaders labored to convince even many of their fellow Christians that Jesus wasn’t a second-tier archangel, but that he along with the Father and the Holy Spirit was and is the one, coeternal God of Israel.

Jesus is time’s omega as well. His Kingdom will have no end. Jesus lasts, and anything else that lasts does so in and because of him. His life is eternal life. The church had to defend this claim, too, against those same Arians, who treated the incarnation of the Word as only temporary. Arians thought of the divine Word shedding Jesus’s human body on the cross and returning to its earlier spirit form. Trinitarians eventually convinced their fellow Christians that Jesus was the Z, not just an X or Y; that his human existence was eternal, so that we can have an eternal existence too; that the same one who died and rose reigns today from heaven and is coming to bring all creation to the perfection that the Father has always intended.

That is the way that we normally use the phrase “alpha and omega.” You can see how vital this compact claim from Revelation 1:8; 21:6; and 22:13 is. Those chapters begin and end the book; they are its A and Z. Jesus Christ frames and dominates the imagination of John, the prophet who wrote the book of Revelation. John isn’t simply coming up with a clever structure. He is passing on the whole structure of his life and thought, which he received from Jesus himself (Rev. 1:1).

And yet, that alpha implies more than just the source of creation’s beginning, and that omega implies more than just the eternity in which creation finds its eternity. Here is what else we hear in Revelation along with alpha-omega language:

1:18: “I died, and behold I am alive for evermore.”

2:8: “The words of [him] . . . who died and came to life.”

11:17–18: “You have taken your great power and begun to reign. . . . Your wrath has come, and the time for judging the dead . . . and for destroying those who destroy the earth.” (NRSV)

16:5–6: “You are just in your judgments. . . . It is their due.” (my translation)

21:5–6: “Behold, I make all things new. . . . It is done! . . . To the thirsty I will give from the fountain of the water of life.”

22:12–14: “Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense. . . . Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city.”

Those alphas are generally new beginnings, not some lingering original past. And those omegas are generally definitive endings of things that never make it into that new and eternal future. This is why this book switches the order. Jesus Christ is also the Z and the A, the last and the first.

Jesus—the End and the Beginning

After all, the biblical story doesn’t unfold smoothly from beginning to end like alphabets do: a, b, c, d, e. History doesn’t follow an orderly sequence right to the end. It is punctuated by disruptions in which an old order is swept away and a new order is begun. And Jesus is the fundamental disruption of all cosmic history.

Let me suggest an analogy. Geologists for the past two hundred years or so have debated two visions of the earth’s history. Did the earth come to be what it is through extraordinary dramatic events such as massive volcanic eruptions7 and meteorite and comet collisions? The “catastrophists” thought so. Or has the earth been shaped primarily by gradual processes such as sedimentation, erosion, and continental drift? “Uniformitarians” insisted on it. Each side made valid observations over the course of their long academic conflict. Most geologists today refuse to wholly endorse one side or the other. Both gradual processes and extraordinary events interact to shape our planet.

History, too, has elements of continuity, gradual change, and shattering disruptions. Return to a place you haven’t visited in years and you may be shocked by the change that happened day by day—perhaps the locals barely noticed. But some dates are etched into the world’s collective memory because nothing could be the same afterward (Z) and people had to pick up the pieces and start again (A, B, C).

The crux of the biblical story is one of those catastrophes. Indeed, crux means cross. Jesus’s crucifixion was an omega: an end of the sequence. “It is finished,” he said when he breathed his last. Yet it wasn’t just finished. After that Z came a new A. Not just a return or revival of some past A, but a whole new A. Many philosophies and religious traditions think of history as a great wheel that turns, placing the world back in a spot it had occupied before. That is not what happened on the third day after Jesus was murdered. God answered Jesus’s demise by creating something totally new: Christ’s risen, eternally embodied life. The resurrection’s new beginning marked the ushering in of a whole new order. This was so staggeringly unprecedented that, as theologian Lesslie Newbigin notes, the apostles had to retrieve Israel’s word for the first unprecedented beginning: creation.8 Jesus’s resurrection had inaugurated a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17).

Inverting the letters captures another element of Jesus’s central role in everything: his indispensable role in putting an end to whatever doesn’t belong in the new creation. The Bible’s creation stories portray God originally granting humanity a privileged role in further developing creation—in moving from A to B to C, so to speak—and equipping human beings for the task. In making all things, God had a mysterious goal in mind. That goal, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Jesus—the End and the Beginning of God
• 3. Jesus—the End and the Beginning of the Cosmos
• 4. Jesus—the End and the Beginning of Humanity
• 5. Jesus—the End and the Beginning of Israel
• 6. Jesus—the End and the Beginning of the Nations
• 7. Jesus—the End and the Beginning of a Life
• Afterword
• Scripture Index
• General Index
• Back cover