"The last enemy to be destroyed is death." [1 Corinthians 15:26]
There's an old saying about military strategy that goes something like this: even though nobody marches elephants through the Alps anymore, it is still wise to study Hannibal.
The gist is that, even if the tactics or technology of combat change, there is something to be learned about the bigger picture strategies that have been used in battle. It is worth, in other words, not only learning who won which battle, or even how many they had in their army and which weapons they carried on to the battlefield, but how the victory was won. Those strategies may be useful to know and claim and make one's own.
So for the followers of Jesus, we who make this strange claim that Jesus won the victory for God from the powers of evil, sin, and death, it is perhaps just as important for us to have a strategy conversation. It is worth it for us to take a moment to ask, "How did Jesus do it?" What is it about Jesus that defeats the powers of death, sin, and evil?
It's worth asking that because we tend to just assume that all victories come down to who has bigger guns, larger armies, or fancier drones and missiles. We tend to assume that victory is simply a matter of throwing more at the other side and simply overwhelming the opponent with brute force. And, yes, sometimes that kind of overwhelming force does prove a useful approach. But the question for us is... is that how Jesus wins his victory?
And the answer is a perplexing... no.
Different enemies require different kinds of approaches. World War II was a different kind of conflict that Vietnam, and both of them are vastly different from, say, the fight against ISIS today in Iraq and Syria. For that matter, in the emerging age of cyber-warfare, all the advanced weaponry in the world may prove useless if an enemy agent hacks its encryption and disables your systems or steals your secrets. Each is a different kind of conflict. And unlike cheap baseball caps with flimsy plastic tabs on the back, one size does not fit all.
And of course, the real issue for Jesus is not a conflict against another "team" or "side" or "nation's" army. Jesus knows that the real adversary, as Paul notes in First Corinthians, is death itself. And you can't defeat death by killing more soldiers. You can't bomb death or send a drone strike. You can't use a missile defense or a wall to protect from death. In fact, there is no hardware to be found, and no software to install, that can outsmart death. You can't hack it, and you can't attack it like a enemy stronghold. Death is a different kind of enemy altogether.
So how is Jesus' victory accomplished? He gets swallowed up... swallowed up by death, in order to break death open from the inside. It is the victory death never saw coming, to let death kill him... and then to break death's inner workings from inside it like the soldiers in the Trojan Horse. It is the kind of win that evil did not understand and therefore could not prevent--to be executed at the hands of the evil empire of the day with the cheering approval of the angry mobs and religious leaders. It is a victory against hatred because Jesus refused to use hate to defeat hate--Jesus embodied the same self-giving love, even for enemies, that he taught. However you describe it, the basic idea is the same--you don't fight death on death's terms with an all-out frontal assault. Jesus defeated death by dying, which is to say, explicitly NOT by killing anybody else (which only makes death more powerful).
I can't help but picture that scene from the Disney classic The Sword in the Stone, based on the earlier T. H. White story of the King Arthur legend, where Merlin the magician is challenged to a "wizard's duel" by the nefarious and wicked Madam Mim, in which each will be allowed to change into different animals to defeat the other. And while the contest begins like a standard "outgun 'em" sort of conflict, with each wizard transforming him or herself into larger and larger creatures to stomp or bite or catch the other, eventually Merlin comes up with a completely different approach: he turns himself into a germ. Instead of going bigger and bigger and bigger and using brute force to crush Mim, he lets himself get swallowed and gives her the chicken pox--undercutting her power from the inside.
Well, something like that is the way the New Testament talks about God's victory in Christ. The heart of the story of the whole universe is of God's defeat of death by dying, and in turn how "death is swallowed up in victory" (1 Cor. 15:54) and how "what is mortal may be swallowed up by life" (2 Cor. 5:4). Jesus doesn't defeat those who would crucify him with a bigger army of better equipped soldiers--that doesn't really solve the problem of death. Jesus doesn't look for bigger and better weapons to get a technological advantage over death. Jesus' divinely clever approach is the way of self-surrender. Jesus himself is swallowed up by death, where, like Merlin-as-a-germ, he can bring down the opponent from the inside without a shot fired.
If we are followers of Jesus, that strategy means something for us, too. If military students still study Hannibal even if they don't use elephants in the army anymore, then we are to be guided by Jesus' way of defeating evil even though none of us is called to die on a cross as the savior of the world. There is, to be sure, something definitive and unrepeatable about Jesus' death on the cross--but there is also a sense in which all of our actions, all of our lives, are called to bear the same shape, the same strategy. You and I are part of Jesus' ongoing movement against the powers of evil; you and I are part of the resistance against the empire of death. But we do not employ the same strategies as the powers of evil, and we will not use the tactics of death. We are called, like Jesus, to use the power of self-surrender, the power of self-giving love, the power of showing goodness to those who have done us wrong, the power of being swallowed-up, to witness to what Jesus accomplished at the cross. That means, as Rudyard Kipling's poem put it so well, "being hated, don't give way to hating," and that even when the powers of the day use angry yelling, lies, or brute force to get their way, we will not give them the satisfaction of using their kind of tactics or playing by their rules.
Today, we are called to follow Christ our commander into the great victory of love that comes through being swallowed up--going into the valley of the shadow of death, yes, and then being swallowed up by life, as well.
Lord Jesus, teach us to practice your way of self-surrender as we witness to your victory in the cross.
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