In this morning’s short reading taken from the Morning Office of the Church (Lauds), we hear the words of St Paul that Christ’s death on the cross destroyed enmity and opposition between the Jew and Gentile, creating a “single New Man in himself out of the two of them” (Ephesians 2:13-6). Christ, in his very person, ushers in a new humanity – a unified humanity – no longer divided against itself through the law: two antithetical positions have not just been brought close, they have been made one through, with and in the person of Christ. Hostility between man and God has been destroyed: a new world order has been ushered in.
It is perhaps shocking to some that the same writer – the Apostle Paul – is heard later, in today’s first reading at Holy Mass, to describe Christ Jesus as the “εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ” (the image of the [unseen] God), invoking the same language used to describe the creation of Adam in the “image of God” in Genesis 1:27. Indeed, the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible employs the same phraseology (imago Dei) in both verses. The inference is that Christ is everything that Adam was – created for life in the Garden of Eden, in the image and likeness of YHWH: Christ is not just created in the imago Dei, but in the imago Adam. Paul seems to argue that Christ restores what once was: he reflects a unity with God that was once humanity’s but has since been lost – the “paradise lost”.
For the theologian Irenaeus of Lyons, Paul’s reference to both a new humanity and the old humanity of Adam is entirely logical. For Irenaeus, salvation and creation are part of a single divine act: it is a distinction drawn from viewing the same act from different perspectives. When God creates Adam, he has Christ in mind (and indeed Paul again informs us in the reading that humanity was created “in Christ” from the very beginning), for it is Christ who will bring both the fulfillment of humanity and the salvation of humanity. He not only saves but shows us what it means to be fully human. Christ and Adam are diametrically opposed in the sense that Adam broke and sinned whilst Christ was faithful and did not sin, but they are typologically connected in that the sin of the first Adam is reversed and overcome by the faithfulness of the eschaton (final) Adam that is Christ Jesus.
Christ is for us what Adam should have been. It is not true to claim that we are sinful because we are human. Christ was fully human – he was fully Adam-like, and yet Paul maintains Christ was sinless. And how great it is to be human: to be like Christ and to be like Adam! Adam, despite his sinfulness – and the fact that he is identified as the one through whom sin and death entered the world – is afforded a remarkable dignity by the Biblical writers. He is unavoidably and inalienably created in the image of his God: and in that sense, the pre-fall Adam demonstrates the happy, joyous and free intention that the creator God has for all humanity.
That reality is realised in He who brings humanity to fulfillment – Christ. In reconciling humanity to God – in drawing an end to hostility and enmity between mankind and God – it was necessary that Christ identified entirely with Adam and entirely with God. The two opposing forces are drawn together not in an ethereal mystery but in a corporeal and personal mystery: and it is in this person that creation reaches its Zenith.
Humanity has a habit of engaging in de-creation: pulling down the barriers that God has erected in creation. Christ is the ultimate transgression of the barriers: the reconciliation of Old and New, the breaching of the metaphysical gap between divine and human. Yet in looking to him we learn what it is to be human: to live with the contradiction and to continue the trudge of our own personal journey of re-creation in a humanity of which he is the head and recapitulator. And when that journey reaches its completion, we will make our own the prophetic words of St Paul: “all things [have been] reconciled through him and for him, everything in heaven and everything on earth: he made peace by his death on the cross.”
