Jesus told his disciples a few times over the past several years that he would have to be delivered over to the Jewish officials who would then hand him over to the Gentiles to be crucified. He transformed the old Passover meal into a memorial meal for his people in which he displayed and gave himself through his own broken body and shed blood in bread and wine. The disciples didn’t understand this, but for them and the rest of the world to have the life of a good, healthy, functioning body, Christ Jesus would have to suffer and die; his body would have to be broken for their bodies to be made whole. Death accompanied by the sting of sin was the fate of man, Adam, as promised by God from the beginning for his disobedience. That is, unlike the death Adam experienced in the creation of Eve when he was resurrected immediately into a greater state of glory, sin would hold him in death’s grip without resurrection.
This is Adam’s fate.
Adam, however, was not merely an individual. We learn in the first scenes of history on the sixth day of creation that God created an individual he named “Adam,” but this was also the name of the man and woman together. Adam is an individual and a society. Adam’s body, therefore, is both his individual person and community united to him. Every living individual from the time of creation derives existence from Adam. He is our father according to the flesh. Each of us and all of us together are bound together with him so that we are one humanity.
But the body that God created to be “one flesh” with the woman and one family with all of their progeny was torn apart by sin so that man, Adam, is dead. Sin viciously and without hope of resurrection rips the body to pieces.
This corrupted Adamic body is the body that Solomon describes in Proverbs 6.16-19. It is a body of death for which moral renovations would not be sufficient. The only answer to death is resurrection. But for resurrection to take place, sin would have to do its full work, fulfilling the just penalty declared by God.
Another Adam would have to be raised up; a son who would embody a new humanity as the first Adam embodied the old. His faithfulness in and through death would not be for himself alone but for all of those in union with him and, indeed, the entire created order he was ordained to rule and whose substance he shared. The old sinful body of Adam plagued by sin and its hopeless death must be destroyed.
From before his birth and throughout his life, Jesus was proclaimed by the Father to be that Son, the faithful Adam. For the world to be reconciled to God and one another, the power given to sin over death must be conquered through resurrection. But to conquer sin’s power, the sin and death deserved by the world would have to be embodied in one body, the body of the second and last Adam. His body would have to be ripped apart by the very sins that ripped the original Adam apart. We see those sins at work in the crucifixion of Jesus.
What tears the body of humanity apart tears apart the body of Christ, the embodiment of humanity, and what tears apart the body of Christ tears apart humanity.
The Jews and Gentiles gathered together against Christ so that all of humanity is represented in the death of Jesus. As in the original fall and death of man, so these seven abominations were at work in the death of Jesus.
Like the serpent followed by the man and woman, Jews and Gentiles had their own wisdom by which they believed the world ought to be ordered. The way Christ proclaimed was not according to their wisdom, so he must be killed. He did not fit into their plan for the world.
Their proud eyes believed that the way to power was through self-exertion and military strength, believing that they could bring peace through self-effort. They exalted their judgments against the judgments of God.
From the time of his arrest all the way through the crucifixion, lying tongues sought to re-shape the reality of who Jesus was so that he would be worthy of death. Judas lied about his commitment to Christ and betrayed him. False witnesses were brought forward, but they couldn’t even get their own lies to agree (Mk 14.43-45; 55-59). Even Peter lied about his relationship with Jesus (Mk 14.66-72)
Jews and Gentiles used the hands given to them, their authority to take hold of creation and transform it, and with them shed innocent blood. Jesus was betrayed into the hands of sinners by Judas (14.41). Judas used his authoritative hands given to him by Jesus to hand him over into the hands of those who would shed his blood, completing Judas’s mission. In response to the cries for crucifixion, Pilate asks, “What evil has he done?” (Mk 15.14). Pilate declares, “I find no fault in him” (Lk 23.14; Jn 18.38; 19.4). Wicked hands shed the blood of the innocent one.
Their feet were swift to run to evil, to condemn this innocent one to death, symbolically putting their feet on his neck. Instead, they nailed his feet and hands to the cross believing that they would stop his dominion project as king of the Jews.
All of this wickedness sprung up from hearts that devised wicked imaginations. These hearts were revealed in their secret plotting to kill Jesus (Mk 14.1-2), conspiring against Yahweh and his Christ, his anointed (cf. Ps 2). They imagined a world in defiance of God’s wisdom.
All of this culminated in the destruction of the body of Jesus in death. As his body is ripped apart, the creation that he embodies convulses and returns to the darkness from which it came. They ripped apart the body of Christ, and in doing so, they tore everything he embodied … which is everything.
Their wicked schemes were all a part of the holy scheme of Wisdom who would reconcile the world through the death of Christ. This is deep wisdom. It is the wisdom of the cross, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those of us who are being saved, it is the power of God for the healing of the world.
