It’s Easter not Christmas…I know but it’s relevant.
For the
resurrection of Easter to mean anything, Jesus had to actually die. Returning
to life is a nonevent if there was no death in the first place. Thus he had to
actually die. And not a death that was in thought only, but a death of tissue
and blood cells, for that is what was returned to life. And that is what our
hope is as well. For Jesus to experience a physical death he had to be human.
Yet, what kind of human?
The
curse of death was placed on Adam and Eve and passed onto their children. Our DNA
is encoded for death. One way is the mitochondria death trigger. What kind of
DNA did Jesus have? He was born of a virgin and did not receive chromosomes
from a male father. This leaves two options. One, that Marry was Artificially inseminated
by the Holy Spirit, which in my opinion is weird. Option two, is that Jesus was
another creation of a human. In other words that he was a new Adam.
I lean
heavily on Jesus being a new human, closer to the original set of DNA, like
Adam was before the fall. Thus, death was not his curse to bear. He willing
took on the curse of death, even though his body was not going to die. And he
cried out when he felt this forsakenness from the Father as he took on death,
our curse. So, no we make a trade, his death for our life. We accept his death
as our curse and offer our live to be lived by him.
We then have the hope that our view
of death is the same as Jesus’ view. Sleep now, to be awakened again. This is
the promise of Easter, the resurrection because Jesus was a new man and through
him we become new again.