“Do you think Jesus experienced problems with re-entry?” A friend posed this question to me the other day. “Because being dead—that’s a big change…” True. Jesus was human, after all. What must it have been like to die, to spend three days capturing captivity, setting all of humanity free from sin and death, and providing for reconciliation to the Father, not to mention having just prior to that experienced complete abandonment, rejection, and betrayal by those closest to you and the most painful and humiliating death known to man. Then to come back to life and find your followers and closest friends cowering in fear, angry that you’d left, that you’d died, and questioning everything you’d ever said. Talk about culture shock. You can do things now like walk through walls and appear out of nowhere, and you have the perspective of having completely conquered death and of having torn the veil from top to bottom—you have the understanding of the Kingdom of Heaven invading earth and of the incredible power of the Almighty God being available to and released through plain ‘ole regular, redeemed human beings like yourself (because you’re still fully human in all of this). That’s a pretty dramatic re-entry. That’s a lot of change in three days, a lot of intense emotions to deal with.
It had never really occurred to me before, but that thought is somehow comforting as I find myself struggling to understand how all of the relationships in my life have changed in the last four months, how I’ve changed, how different life looks to me now. What an amazing idea that even in this, my God has gone before me.
