Adam on Good Friday
Nota Bene: This is a repost of last year’s Good Friday post, with some adaptations.
Today, the Christian Church celebrates the passion of its founder, Jesus Christ. Today, many of us will mark his passage into the tomb while the world is still in the throes of a pandemic, perhaps even in lockdown.
The events leading up to his death on Golgotha are a brutal tragedy. They violate the virtue of justice, the rules of evidence, and the integrity of the human person. The Son of Man is bound, whipped, crushed, nailed and strangled to death. In the aftermath, he is bound again and placed in a tomb.
Living with our first world problems, our being housebound amidst our gadgetry, panic-purchase groceries and stockpiles of toilet paper, does not even compare to the bindings imposed on the Man of Sorrows. They do not even compare to the scores of newly unemployed, newly rendered-homeless, and the persecuted migrant workers or the victims of ongoing warfare or ongoing religious persecution, those other members of the Body of Christ who face contemporary crucifixions in our day.
The limitations to our designs, projects and aspirations in the face of pandemic, are not so frivolous as to fade into insignificance. In their own small way, even our inconveniences can be meaningfully connected to the Passion, and play some part in the drama of redemption.
How might we understand this drama, and our place in it?
One first step would be to look into the ancient theologians of one of the two major theological schools: the school of Alexandria (the other being Antioch, which we might cover another time). Drawing heavily on the Gospel of John, the Alexandrian theologians describe what should be a tragedy as the time of Jesus’ glorification. In what sense can we, reflecting on the brutality of the cross, at the same time become witnesses and even participants in the glorification of the man hanging on it?
At this point, I would like to reflect on four tropes used to describe Jesus in the event of the crucifixion: the Priest, the Lamb of God, the Bridegroom and the Second Adam.
The Priest and Lamb motifs are obvious enough and often go together. Christ the True High Priest offers Himself as the sacrificial Lamb and takes on the sins of many on the cross. Jesus, taking on that sin and experiencing the consequent separation from the Father, cries out in the words of Psalm 21: My God! My God! Why Have you forsaken me?
But what of the other two themes? How are they played out in the context of the Passion?
In chapter 9 of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus portrays himself as a Bridegroom that will soon be taken away. Usually, we associate the being taken away with his being taken up into heaven, only marrying the Church at the wedding feast of the lamb at the conclusion Book of Revelation. But it makes no sense to have a bridegroom and not have a wedding here and now, until we remember that there was another, more intermediate episode of the Bridegroom being taken away from his guests: namely the removal of Jesus from the company of his disciples during the Passion. The eschatological wedding feast of the Lamb had already taken place within history in the form of the Last Supper.
But wherefore the wedding, and where is the nuptial moment taking place? It is here that the third motif of Jesus as the second Adam comes into play.
Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians makes a number of compelling parallels between Adam and Jesus, and these Adamic themes in the Scriptures have been continued on in the writings of Church Fathers like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyon and John Chrysostom. This Adamic theme in the Church Fathers is summarised in the fifth paragraph of Vatican II’s Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium. In the book of Genesis, as Adam slept, God created a woman out of his side who was to be his bride. In a new Genesis in John 19:34, as Jesus slept the sleep of death, God also caused a woman, the Church, to be created out of his side, a woman who is also to be the Bride of Christ.
But note also that in the Book of Genesis, the creation of the woman in 2:23 is immediately followed by a nuptial moment in 2:24, namely
For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.
The creation of the woman out of the side of Adam is at the same time a nuptial union between him with Eve. If Jesus the Second Adam was meant to complete in his humanity what was left incomplete in the first Adam, this means that the crucifixion is where the Second Adam marries the Church upon its creation from the side of the Bridegroom. This is why, in speaking of the Passion, John Chrysostom ended his Good Friday homily with the rhetorical question: Do you understand then, how Christ has united his Bride with Himself…?
The crucifixion is glorious because it is both a trauma and a wedding. It is glorious because the Second Adam brings about on the cross a new Genesis, and it is glorious because it constitutes the starting point for the unfolding of a new Eden within history. It is glorious because the cross becomes the fulcrum by which the old order is thereby overturned.
Many will enter the tomb with Christ on this day. Many more will hover at the threshold between life and death on this day, and perhaps beyond. Some of us will not even come close to this, suffering no more than an inconvenience on this day. If we fall into this category, our sufferings might be miniscule, but they are not meaningless.
If we are in lockdown, with our conveniences curtailed, we can still enter into the tomb with Christ. In this time of lockdown we might even realise where our own interior tombs - spiritual, psychological and emotional - are found. We might enter into those with Christ, connecting ourselves to Body of the Bridgegroom, who walks the empty avenues of our locked and diseased cities, renewing in our day nuptial drama that he set in motion.
A blessed Pasch to all.
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