Athanasius says that God saw humanity falling from existence into nothingness, that God could not bear to lose the creatures he loved to non-existence—the ones in all creation that alone were made in the image of his eternity—and so the Son takes on the one human nature shared by all humans in order to rescue humanity from death.
I love the beauty of that.
Our human predicament finds one of its simplest biblical expressions in Wisdom 1:13-15,2:23-24 (which happens to be one way the lectionary preacher can go this coming Sunday if she chooses to preach on the Old Testament).
Here’s what those passages say:
“God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living. For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them, and the dominion of Hades is not on earth.
“For righteousness is immortal. God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his company experience it.”
The origin of human death is not God but “the devil’s envy” and humanity’s subsequent fall from the incorruptible life of God God intended for humanity.
Human death has its origin in demonic and human evil, in a privation of the good; death is here described (long before Paul) as opposed to God’s desire for humanity.
The first Christians proclaimed the defeat of human death, the dark powers, and all of our opposition to love by the entire event of Christ's life from conception to ascension.
For Athanasius and his near contemporaries salvation is the work of God healing humanity from corruption and the grave in the flesh of Jesus Christ suspended on the cross.
God for the first Christians is NOT the one who "comes only to steal, kill, and destroy.” For them, death is NOT the agent or partner of God but God's last enemy, as Paul teaches.
I am and have always been—even as a young Pentecostal unfamiliar with the early tradition—someone who shares with the Christian East the belief that death is utterly alien to the character of God; that God is at perfect enmity with it.
God in Christ "tramples down death by death."
This is not to say that we who follow Christ live in denial of human death. It is all too real. And all too horrific. We all will die.
There are paradoxes at work here.
Because of the human life lived by God in Jesus Christ, we find the vocation of taking up our cross and dying as the path that now leads to life without end, the path to Christ’s risen humanity.
The cross is the way we finally become human in the fullest sense.
The death of Jesus was the death of death. The descent of Jesus to hell fills death with the presence of the Living God. There is now no place where death is stronger than Love.
Love is stronger than death.
As in Adam all died so in Christ will all be made alive.
Still, Christians are not cozy with the enemies of God.
We do not seek death as a means of escaping the good embodied existence that from the beginning God meant for us to enjoy without end.
We are in Christ and so our orientation to death is the same orientation of God in the flesh: total opposition.
God hates death because death threatens to end the existence of the creature he made in his image, the human. God hates death because death is not of or from God.
Christians are the ones who do not deny the evil of human death by trying to frantically ignore it all our lives. We don’t join the predominant culture in keeping it always at arm’s length.
We also don’t seek it as a form of escape from our good embodiment or the world God made good.
We no longer fear death because human death has been transfigured into a path to the life of the world that’s coming to this world after Christ puts his last enemy under his footstool.
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