“At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid.” John 19:41

What comes to mind when you think of God’s future agenda for creation and humanity? The resurrection of Jesus highlights God’s future for creation and humanity. Like a commercial in the middle of an intriguing show, Jesus distracts us and reveals how God is making all things new. Jesus is the beginning, the first of his kind to come from the dead. Jesus is the first to rise from the dead with a new physical reality. His body has the capability of doing things that nobody ever considered possible; he is the new Genesis, the new creation, the 8th day, the day of new beginnings. Jesus is the new creation and not simply the inauguration of it. In him, heaven and earth–spirit and matter–are bound together (Ephesians 1:10).

Jesus, after being crucified, was buried in a tomb located in a garden. From that tomb he arose with a new kind of life. He made life and immortality obvious (2 Timothy 1:10). Jesus is new, he is the new Adam. God finally has a human who perfectly bears God’s image and who will rule God’s world on God’s term. Jesus is the last Adam, he is Adam at last, in a garden similar to the first Adam. Have you ever contemplated the irony, the strangeness of a tomb in a garden? See, the garden is the place where things die and are reborn again. Every garden is at one time a graveyard. Seeds terminate to germinate. Jesus said unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies it remains a single seed (John 12:24). Jesus died so that he wouldn’t remain a single seed. He died that he might have you, the church, which is the completion of him who completes everything (Eph 1:23).

The garden in the east of Eden was to be the start, the prototype, from which Adam would cultivate the earth. Even so, out of that tomb, out of that garden on the first day of the week, came God’s new creation, a new human, the resurrected Lord of the world! Out of that tomb came the beginning, the new Genesis. And from that tomb, from the garden, from the symbolic Eden, newness spreads to the last inhabited place on the planet. The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. The new humanity, which you are, began in Christ as Christ. The resurrection of Jesus inspires hope that God will not only remake these fragile bodies, but also remake this fragile world to be his home and a resting place for the new Adam (Jesus) and the new Eve (the church).

You are a new creation living in an old world while actively anticipating a new world. Sunday, the first day of the week, is about the new creation overlapping the old creation! “Now on the first day of the week…early, while it was still dark” the Light of the World came back from death (John 20:1). Sunday is God’s benevolent ambush!