Death and Afterlife 6 - How does Jesus Cure Death?

 How is it that Christ cures death? Is it really possible that we can be freed from death? 

We only have to understand the truth of the Gospels. In them we witness the Incarnation of Jesus as both Man and God. After a short period where He healed miraculously and taught, He was unjustly Crucified. Why would He allow this?  Only to show us what we can hope for, our resurrection through His Resurrection. We know God is all knowing. We know that He foreknew what would happen by permitting disobedience, knowing that when the time was right that He would act. God sent His only begotten Son so we through Him could claim victory over death.

When Jesus took flesh from the Theotokos in His mystical virginal birth, God becomes fully Man while remaining fully God. In this process and our baptism He transformed human nature. Christ came to dwell in each of us so Man could now be united with Him eternally in His kingdom. He showed us the path through death to defeat death.

Saint Paul speaks thus: 

He “shared in their humanity so that by his death He might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—
 and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”

After His Resurrection the disciples witnessed His Ascension to Heaven. By this He showed us that the doors to Paradise were now open to those who follow His teaching with love. After His Ascension, Christ sends down the Holy Spirit empowering His disciples to spread the Good News and to establish communities of believers. This is His Church where He is the head, and all the faithful who follow become His body here on Earth. All this was God's plan to heal mankind from their fallen condition of separation from God because of the sinful tendencies due to our fear of death.

As a result Jesus Christ is seen as a new Adam, providing a new start for humanity. Saint Athanasios the Great puts it this way:

The bodiless and incorruptible and immaterial Logos of the Father, seeing how men had become slaves of death, was compassionate to our race. Because He could not bear to see death reining over men, His creation lost in vanity and the work of God the Father remaining imperfect in us men, Christ took on a body for Himself that was not different than our own, Being God omnipotent, He could, of course, have appeared on earth in another manner more divine. And yet, He chose to receive our own body and to be born of the Virgin Mother of God a body similar to ours, and since all men are subject to death and corruption, He delivered this body, in the place of all, unto death and offered it as a sacrifice to God the Father.

Paul writes:

For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.

Jesus pioneers a new way of life we call the Orthodox way of life. He fulfills Adam's potential to become like God and makes it possible for us to do the same.

Through our faith we participate in His life, Him in us and we in Him. By linking our will with His, we become united with Him, and are gradually cured from the fear of death through the synergy of our effort and the work of the Holy Spirit, His grace.

So why do we still fear death? Next.