Jesus is the New Adam
Friends in Christ,
today in the gospel, we revisit that wondrous scene at the tomb; Mary Magdalene is there, the sinner who has been forgiven. We see that angels are there: “And as she wept, bending down, she saw two angels in white.”
.
Jesus is there, although at first he is not recognized by Mary, and interestingly, he addresses her as ‘Woman.’ ‘Woman, why do you weep?’ The sacred text also tells us that she thought Jesus was the gardener; so it was in a garden, and in fact earlier St. John tells us that the tomb was ‘in a garden.’
.
Now if we think hard, we see that these facts are clues; When writing this gospel, St. John did not have to include these bits of information, but he did. He put it down this way so that if we ponder this scene, of Jesus and a ‘Woman’ in a garden, we will immediately think of the garden of Eden, where there was a Man and a Woman.
.
If we recall, when Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden, an angel was placed at the entrance to guard it, to block the way, we were blocked from Paradise. So we see here in the scene of the resurrection, also angels – but they are not blocking anything because the way is now open for us to Paradise.
.
In 1 Corinthians St. Paul says, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. So the way that this resurrection scene is written, St. John is intentionally trying to teach us that Jesus is the New Adam, as St. Paul also says.
.
Christ is the perfect Man, and he is one of us, he is our brother. He has done what Adam and no one of us could do, and that is, atone for our sins, and save us from death, and hell. The New Adam has won the victory for us, and given us the hope of immortality.
.
St. Paul says, ‘Behold, I tell you a mystery: we shall all indeed rise, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet; for the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall rise incorruptible and we shall be changed. For this corruptible body must put on incorruption and this mortal body must put on immortality.
