“O death, where is your victory? O Hades, where is your sting?”
The opposite of this magnificent saying of Paul is the saying of Job (30:23): death is “the house appointed for all the living.” These two sayings sum up the contrast between how the Old and New Testaments see life and death, that is, before and after the resurrection of Christ.
Before Jesus’ resurrection, death was the only certainty, an unavoidable passage. For Adam comes from the “adamah,” the earth, and “you are dust and to dust you shall return.” The people of the Old Testament knew hardly any images of resurrection. Martha’s conversation with Jesus, when he told her, “Your brother will rise again,” shows a certain expectation, but it could not reach the clarity of believing that this earthly human body would be raised after death.
The human being has a double nature. His human, bodily nature, in its biological aspect, is mortal; it is dust and will return to dust by the law of nature. In this, man shares the fate of the animal
world: death. But his second nature, through which he is connected with God, that is, the image and likeness of God in him, does not accept death as an end, for God is immortal and this nature is in his image. So the human being carries these two worlds in conflict within himself: his biological nature imposes death on him, while his spiritual nature refuses it.
Man has always chased after the idea of immortality and after the “plant” of life that would free him from death as an end. The solutions and compromises for this conflict have wandered with him. The Jews accepted death as the reality and destiny of every person, with vague and faded images of some kind of survival in a world they called Sheol. Philosophies invented the immortality of the soul… But before Jesus’ resurrection, death was a certainty and life a hypothesis. Then Jesus rose, and the realities were turned upside down: life became the certainty and death a sleep, as the Lord called it when Lazarus died.
The book of Genesis stresses this conflict between the reality of biological death and the human longing to endure. That is why it states plainly that God, when he created man, placed for him two different trees side by side in paradise. The first was the tree of life, a symbol of the mystery of immortality, of victory over death and of an elixir of endurance for his mortal bodily life (Genesis 2:9). But God forbade him to eat of the fruit of this tree before he had passed his test before the second tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:16-17). This clearly says that immortality is a possibility for the human body if its spiritual nature passes the test of knowledge. It is the integrity of man’s spiritual nature that will make him fit to eat the fruit of endurance. It is the resurrection of the spirit that will also open the way to the resurrection of the body.
That is what was possible, but it is not what happened. Free in the test of knowledge, man chose his own wisdom apart from God, and he fell. And this being of double nature, torn between submitting to death and rebelling against it, had to die. This is the daily experience of every person. However painful the drama of death is for a human being, he must move beyond it and accept its pain without protest.
But Jesus ended this conflict; that is why he came, “so that we may have life.” Jesus is the only son of Adam who fully passed the test of “knowledge.” Because he fasted, supremely, before the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he gained authority over the tree of life. He alone is a man without sin. In his freedom he never let his will drift away from the divine will, even in the hardest moments, and he cried out in his agony, “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not my will, but yours.”
Jesus’ resurrection broke the long silence about resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection overturned what seemed inevitable. Jesus made us a sure promise: “To the one who conquers I will give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God” (Revelation 2:7). “If, because of one man’s trespass (Adam’s), death reigned, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:17).
So death is no longer a burial; it has become a sowing. That is why Paul speaks of what is sown in corruption and reaped in incorruption. The perishable body is sown in the earth at death, and we await its rising in the radiant form that Jesus showed us after his resurrection.
Christ is risen, and the demons have fallen; Christ is risen, and death has died; Christ is risen, and Hades is taken captive. O death, where is your victory? O Hades, where is your sting? “We celebrate the death of death, the destruction of Hades, the beginning of another life, eternal, and with joy we sing the praises of the one who is its cause.” Amen.
Father Gerard Abi Saab
Note: some later Old Testament texts already express a clear hope of resurrection (for example Daniel 12:2 and 2 Maccabees 7), and Martha herself replies, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (John 11:24).
