Think again of the poems at the start of Luke’s gospel. God has fulfilled the promises to Abraham; now things can proceed in a new way.

If Jesus Christ was really raised from the dead—if he is really the Son of God and you believe in him—all these things that you long for most desperately will come true at last. We will escape time and death. We will know love without parting, we will even communicate with nonhuman beings (think angels), and we will see evil defeated forever. In fa

Jesus’s final word, tetelestai, “It’s all done!” says it clearly. The story has been completed—the story of creation, the story of God’s covenant with Israel. Now new creation can begin, as it does immediately afterwards with Jesus’s resurrection. Now the new covenant can be launched, as the disciples are sent out into the world equipped with Jesus

It was, above all, a joyous proclamation, and a call to a lost people to find their true home at last, in their Father’s house. It did not initially make its appeal to human hearts by forcing them to revert to some childish or bestial cruelty latent in their natures; rather, it sought to awaken them to a new form of life, one whose premise was char