Metaphor 23 - The Abend of Death

When I was first learning how to program computers, there was a sort of science fictional television show I used to watch. In one episode of this show there were these evil scientists who had what they declared to be the world’s most powerful super computer, one that could answer any question ever put to it. So the protagonist of the show asked the super computer one simple question: "Why?" And sure enough the big fancy machine started sputtering and smoking and blowing up.

I’ve always liked that scene because it is my mental picture of what happened to Death the day Christ died. For you see, Death has always had a syllogism. And computer programs are merely electronic syllogisms. The syllogism of death is:

Socrates is a man.
All men are mortal.
Therefore:
Socrates is mortal.

On the day Christ died, He was fully Man, and He was fully God, so the syllogism went:

Jesus Christ is a man.
All men are mortal.
Therefore:
THAT NOT DOES NOT COMPUTE!

Since God cannot die, Death did. The syllogism of Death had "abended." And the Record says that Christ now holds "the keys of Death and of Hell."

And so after the third day, the resurrection of Christ took place.

Did it really? We have the word of the original witnesses "the apostles whom he had chosen: To whom also he shewed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days." And we have the word of another witness: "he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also..."

And what a resurrection it was!

Those who knew Him before quickly realized that something about Him had changed: His body. It was recognizable as Him. But He could make it unrecognizable at will.

It was not bound by physical limitations. He could suddenly appear in the middle of a locked room. And He could just as quickly vanish into thin air.

And to reassure his students and friends that He not a ghost, He asked for and ate a piece of fish and some honeycomb in front of them. He invited them to touch Him and see that He was flesh and bone.

And in doing so they found out His new body was indeed of flesh and bone, but not blood. For His new body still had the wounds of His old: the holes in His hands and feet and the spear puncture in His side.

His old body had been transformed into a new kind. Later on they would find out His body was capable of rising up into the sky and out of their sight. And one man found, even later, that it was capable of radiating glory, for when he saw it, it was as a light that in midday was shining from heaven above the brightness of the sun.

It was a body of glory. It was a body fit for the fellowship of the "Persons" of the Godhead.

It took a while for Christ’s students to understand what had taken place with the death and resurrection of Christ. But eventually they were shown that it was not an event that had happened just to Christ, but also something that had happened to them, and not just them, but anyone else who understood and believed that it had also happened to them as well.

What Christ did on the cross was not only to die as Man for the sins of all men for all time, but also to take into death the collective aspect of the human inwardness, the Chicagoland I’ve been talking about, and render it powerless over the individual who was born into it.