Chapter 4
That Death May Die
When we meet Jesus at the beginning of the first book of the New Testament, we meet him in a long list of people who had lived and died over the centuries. All the people whom God had walked with along the road Adam doomed us to tread. All the people whom God had given promises and, as the writer of Hebrews points out, who had failed to see those promises come true in their fullness (Hebrews 11:39–40). From Abraham all the way to Jesus’s earthly father, the list carries with it the unspoken reality that life ends in death. But the opening chapters of Matthew also point out that Jesus’s birth is very different than every human who went before him. He’s special—from conception he is not like the humans who walked Adam’s road before him.
We tend to think of Jesus’s incarnation only in terms of his death on the cross as a payment for our sin. The final sacrifice cleansing humanity of the stain of rebellion. The gift of the infant in a manger releases us from the penalty of our wrongdoings, but what of his life? What did Jesus’s life accomplish for us?
Jesus was the last chance for humanity to escape the road we were stuck on—the road Adam set our feet to and that always ends in death. Conceived by the Spirit in the human womb of Mary and birthed into a dark night in Bethlehem, Jesus’s own feet struck out along the path that so many had tread before. Only this time, the human on that journey was not corrupt like his fathers and mothers. He was humanity reforged—true humanity the way it was meant to be from the beginning. The very perfect image of God and the pattern after which all humans could and should have been made.
Long ago, the church father Athanasius set into words the brilliant significance of the arrival of the second Adam—true human and true ruler of the earth:
You know what happens when a portrait that has been painted on a panel becomes obliterated through external stains. The artist does not throw away the panel, but the subject of the portrait has to come and sit for it again, and then the likeness is re–drawn on the same material. Even so was it with the All–holy Son of God. He, the Image of the Father, came and dwelt in our midst, in order that he might renew humanity made after himself. (On the Incarnation, 3.14)
Jesus walked Adam’s road in its entirety. The same road your feet and my feet tread. Along the way he enjoyed the sweetness of his friends, the joy of laughter, and the peace of a sunrise spent with his Father. But he also walked in the same dust, the same pain, the same heartache that threatens to undo us all. The road left scars on the new Adam long before he reached the end. We cannot for a moment doubt that Jesus does not know what it’s like to live as we live. To feel what we feel. To face the devastating reality that no one sets out on Adam’s road and leaves it alive.
For Jesus, that road led to a garden—a place where he would find the courtyard of death’s dark cave. Like the first Adam, Jesus wrestled with the will of the Creator–God. Like the first Adam, Jesus faced a choice: continue in trusting submission to his Father or turn his back and walk away from everything he had worked to build. The hope of humanity balanced on a knife’s edge in the moments Jesus prayed and wept and ground his teeth in agony.
Three times Jesus asked for another way for his road to end. Three times he begged his Father to steer him into another destiny than the one that awaits all humans. And three times Jesus—the new and perfect Adam—bent his will into submission to the Father and accepted his fate.
We often think of the cross as God’s victory. After all, there on the bloodied wood hung the final sacrifice for sin’s corruption. But hours earlier in the quiet dark of Gethsemane, Jesus accomplished what Adam could not. He surrendered. Nothing would sway Jesus from the moment he stood and stepped out of the garden onto the road toward Jerusalem. He had chosen obedience—even if it meant death.
The victory of Jesus was captured early on by his followers in a song. The weathered apostle Paul quoted it while writing to the Christians in Philippi:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross! (Philippians 2:6–8)
From the first days of Christianity, Jesus’s friends and followers understood that something significant happened in that garden. Jesus was born onto Adam’s road, bore in his soul and flesh the markings of pain and joy and all the things every human experiences between birth and the grave. But the road didn’t have to end in death for Jesus—he was true humanity unstained by Adam’s curse. The choice to walk away always lay before him. In a sense, he could have abandoned us to our fate without hope and saved himself. But instead he chose to keep going. To march directly into death’s cavernous mouth. Jesus chose to walk Adam’s road right to the bitter end.
For a moment, when Jesus surrendered his last breath while nailed to a Roman cross, it seemed like death won. The ground shook and the skies went dark as if they mourned the loss of the true Adam and the true king of the earth. But the strength of death began to fail with Jesus’s last cry.
The curtain that separated humanity from their God split in two. And the graves of those who had walked their road faithfully alongside their Creator cracked, and their captives went free into the daylight. Death, it seemed, was breaking. For three days, death tried to hold Jesus. For three days, it kept the soul and body of the new Adam torn apart. But after three days, death could hold him no longer.
When Adam and Eve chose to set themselves up as their own rulers, they left the path that God had chosen for them—a path that would lead them only to peace and wholeness and every good thing. Instead, they set their feet on a road of self–determination. But they were not gods. They had no power to dictate the course of their lives. Instead, they trapped themselves and all of humanity after them on a journey toward the unmaking of everything they wanted to build for themselves. Death was the end of the road for all humanity. For all time.
Until it met Jesus.
After three days, the cave of death shattered. The new Adam who lived and died and lived again sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the burial platform. He set his feet on the ground and stood. In the early morning quiet, a loud crack split the air, and the massive rock sealing the cave of death heaved aside. Jesus, the heir of Adam and the true image of God, walked into the sunlight.
In his resurrection, Jesus defeated death. But he did not remove it from the road all humanity must walk. Instead, he followed Adam and all humanity before him into death’s dark cave and then blew a hole right out the back of it. For Jesus—and for all who would follow him now—the road still leads to death. Only it does not end in death. The road goes right on through to the other side.
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