Jesus was an unlikely Messiah.
His ministry on earth was a surprise. He wasn’t interested in drawing the people back to Torah in order to demonstrate that they were God’s faithful people. And he demonstrated a breadth of authority that not only regained all the glory of Adam, but extended even to the restoration of people’s relations to God.
His death was a surprise. The dissociation between “king of Israel” and “defeater of the Romans” that we take for granted was perhaps the greatest gap between what the Messiah was supposed to do and what Jesus failed to do. Rather than defeating the Romans in armed uprising, Jesus suffered the fate of those whose uprisings against Rome had failed.
But it’s not just that Jesus was crucified. Surprising as that was, the more incomprehensible idea was that this crucifixion would somehow be, not the denial of his messiahship, but the quintessential embodiment of it. What it means to be Messiah is, somehow, inseparably tied to the cross. When the sign above his head reads, “The King of the Jews,” we know that the words are true though to Rome the cross was the way of showing that this pretender would have no rule.
If cruciform coronation was a surprise, it was topped only by Jesus’ resurrection-enthronement. Yes, the kings of old had been “enthroned at God’s right hand,” but what was figuratively true of them is now literally true of Jesus.
As in Jesus’ earthly ministry, so too with the resurrection, the categories of Adamic and Davidic kingship are affirmed–and at the same time exploded. Jesus is more. Jesus does more. What they idealized, Jesus realized. Full defeat of God’s enemies? Yes–but enemies more cosmic and powerful than any earthly king. Sin is undone. And death is defeated.
Humanity is ruling the world again. As it was in the beginning it is now once again. All the glory of Adam has been restored.
And then, the greatest surprise of all. As the story unfolds, it seems all along that the first is Adam. He is the model. He is the firstborn of all creation. He is the ruler of the earth. It is for his sake that all things are made. He rules all things for God. Here is the type to which all future kings must conform. Here is the glory to be restored by the Messiah.
So it seems.
But at the end we discover what, as I said, is the greatest surprise of all.
Adam himself was not the first, the model upon which all others would be modeled. Adam was modeled on a prior son. Adam was the firstborn of the earth. But there was a firstborn from before the foundation of the earth.
Adam was given rule, but another son was already ruling the world for God.
Adam was to be on earth what the other Son was already in heaven.
And so when our “second Adam” is exalted on high, it is nothing if not a restoration to the glory that was his with the Father before the world began.
Surprise.
Daniel
Even when I don’t find myself agreeing with all you say I like the fact that you want to focus in what God has done in Christ. This is the foundation and fountain of all true worship.
I like this surprise.
This is simply a brilliant post! Thanks.
Thank you for this post!
Great inspiration here Daniel (and no surprise in that).
The last material on Adam and Christ is very weighty I think.
And this other way of putting the crucifixion – that in it Jesus suffers the fate of all the failed messiahs who ever were or will be – Wow.
By accepting a ‘rebel’s death’ as a fate not beneath his own, Jesus shows conscious solidarity with all seekers of justice. But he had to do so in a manner consistent with a rejection of their man-made hopes for divine intervention.
Second Temple Judaism had driven the Messiah concept into an uninspired box canyon of Real-Politic from which the real God had no longer any exit consistent with his nature.
God could not ‘honor’ the Jewish expectations in association with an actual divine incarnation. But he could still honor human political struggle per se, by accepting its fate.
Being on a spiritual mission of redemption, the real Christ-of-God thus has no option but to appear to the most learned elders as the Jewish anti-Christ (defined by them ever since as ‘failed Messiah’) and to the Romans as a crucified ‘King of the Jews.’