Holy Friday: Death is the Enemy of God

The purpose of Christianity is not to help people by reconciling them with death but to reveal the Truth about life and death in order that people may be saved by this Truth.  … Christianity is not reconciliation with death.  It is the revelation of death, and it reveals death because it is the revelation of Life.  Christ is this Life.  And only if Christ is Life is death what Christianity proclaims it to be, namely the enemy to be destroyed, and not a ‘mystery’ to be explained.  Religion and secularism, by explaining death, give it a ‘status,’ a rationale, make it ‘normal.’  Only Christianity proclaims it to be abnormal and, therefore, truly horrible.  At the grave of Lazarus Christ wept, and when His own hour to die approached, ‘he began to be sore amazed and very heavy.’  In the light of Christ, this world, this life are lost and beyond mere ‘help,’ not because there is fear of death in them, but because they have accepted and normalized death.  To accept God’s world as a cosmic cemetery which is to be abolished and replaced by an ‘other world’ which looks like a cemetery (‘eternal rest’) and to call this religion, to live in a cosmic cemetery and to ‘dispose’ every day of thousands of corpses and to get excited about a ‘just society’ and to be happy! – this is the fall of man.  It is not the immorality or the crimes of man that reveal him as a fallen being; it is his ‘positive idea’ – religious or secular – and his satisfaction with this ideal.  This fall, however, can be truly revealed only by Christ, because only in Christ is the fullness of life revealed to us, and death, therefore, becomes ‘awful,’ the very fall from life, the enemy.  It is this world (and not any ‘other world’), it is this life (and not some ‘other life’) that were given to man to be a sacrament of the divine presence, given as communion with God, and it is only through this world, this life, by ‘transforming’ them into communion with God that man was to be.  The horror of death is, therefore, not in its being the ‘end’ and not in physical destruction.  By being separation from the world and life, it is separation from God.  The dead cannot glorify God.  It is, in other words, when Christ reveals Life to us that we can hear the Christian message about death as the enemy of God.  It is when Life weeps at the grave of the friend, when it contemplates the horror of death, that the victory over death begins.   (Fr. Alexander Schmemann, FOR THE LIFE OF THE WORLD)

The Defeat of Death and the Beauty of New Creation

 Great and Holy Friday

In Orthodoxy, the Genesis story of the creation and fall of humanity is what gives rise to the need for salvation – the very particular salvation of God becoming human in order to restore humanity to God.   If we understand the story of Genesis 1-3, we can make sense of the purpose of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and how Christ, as a new Adam, not only undoes all that the first Adam did wrongly but He does all that Adam left undone, all that Adam failed to do in and for creation.  So the comparing and contrasting of the first Adam in Paradise with the new Adam, Jesus Christ, who restores us to Paradise is a common theme in Christian writing – it helps us both understand the real meaning of Genesis (not its mere literal reading which does not reveal the full purpose of the story) because Christ becomes the key which unlocks the meaning hidden in the Genesis text.  In Christ we finally understand what it is to be human – it is to be in full communion with God.

This is what I mean: Adam rightly died, for he had sinned; the Lord died unjustly, for He sinned not. Until the Lord’s crucifixion death rightly had dominion over men. But since the Lord was sinless, what right did the devil have to put Him to death? Unjustly subjected to death, the Lord vanquished the one who put him to death and, so doing, freed Adam from the death he deserved as a sinner. Moreover, consider the two chief passions which held sway over the human race-pleasure and grief. Neither could conquer Christ when He became man. First the devil attacked Him on the mountain tempting Him with pleasure [Mt. 4:3-9]. Finding Him invincible, the devil then employed the cunning snare of grief to defeat Him, if he could. Again the Lord prevailed. No matter what kind of sorrow the Lord faced-the disciples’ denial, the soldiers’ mockery, the blasphemies of the bystanders- the devil found Him to be unconquerable. Not even the grief of crucifixion could induce the Lord to hate His murderers…. Instead, He loved them and prayed for them saying, “Father, lay not this sin to their charge.” See how He conquered by the very means which seemed to accomplish His defeat! Therefore, the cross has become His exaltation and His glory.” (The Blessed Theophylact, THE EXPLANATION OF THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. JOHN)

The story of Christ’s death and resurrection is the story of humanity restored to God and of the promised new creation.  The sin of Adam and Eve led to humanity being exiled from Paradise, and the entire Old Testament is a repeating story of humans falling short, falling into sin and being left outside of the promised land.  In Christ humanity’s exile from God ends.

The theme of the new Eden (the thorns and briers of Genesis 3 replaced with beautiful shrubs) picks up one of the main subtexts of the whole biblical story.  Ultimately, the real exile, the real leaving-home moment, was the expulsion of humankind from the Garden of Eden.  Israel’s multiple exiles and restorations are ways of reenacting that primal expulsion and symbolically expressing the hope for homecoming, for humankind to be restored, for God’s people to be rescued, for creation itself to be renewed.  And one of the main themes that comes back again and again, bubbling up unstoppably and echoing around the ancient prophecy as it echoes around the human heart, is the beauty of the new creation, of Jerusalem and its inhabitants, of the landscape filled with peaceful animals, of the mountains and hills singing for joy.  Isaiah never forgot that the reason God called Abraham in the first place was in order to put the entire creation back to rights, to fill heaven and earth with his glory.

But new creation will come about only through one final and shocking exile and restoration.  The themes of king and Temple, of Torah and new creation, of justice, spirituality, relationship, and beauty, come rushing together in the dark theme which lies at the heart of the same book of Isaiah.  The king turns into a servant, YHWH’s servant.    (N.T. Wright, SIMPLY CHRISTIAN: WHY CHRISTIANITY MAKES SENSE)

The crucifixion story is that final shocking exile revealing how far humanity has fallen away from God.  Yet God overcomes that distance and that exile and in His love He transfigures and transforms fallen mortal creation, raising Jesus from the dead, destroying the power of death, and thus revealing the beauty of His creation and its power over death.