Adam and Christ

Adam and Christ – understanding sin by grace

“No one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God” (1Cor 2:11b)

Introduction

The notion that Adam is a boy is endorsed worldwide. In what follows, I’m going to use it to compare Adam and Christ along five reference lines: birth, loneliness, creation of woman, marriage and naming. My aim is to contribute to our understanding of the following:

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“We must know Christ as the source of grace in order to know Adam as the source of sin” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 388).

1. Birth

Adam and Christ differ quite a lot as to their origin and identity. If Adam is the first male, well, Christ is the perfect male (Eph 4: 13). Adam comes from earth, but Christ comes from heaven (1 Cor 15: 47).  The LORD God formed Adam as a living being from the dust and the breath of life (Gen 2: 6), but he didn’t form Christ that way. Christ was conceived into a woman by the Holy Spirit (Lk 1, 31).

Rationale: The first man comes from below, while Christ, the last Adam (1Cor 15: 45), comes from above. The perfect male is born of a woman. Adam is not.

2. Being alone

When first created, Adam was alone, all by himself, just one, and this was not good (Gen 2: 18). Adam needed some help - a creature in front of him. He necessitated a companion capable of corresponding to him (Gen 2: 18). And guess what? Christ was similarly alone when hanging from the cross, all by himself, just one. He was without a companion, forsaken, abandoned (Mt 27: 46; Ps 22: 1). No one was able to correspond to him, for he was God “in human likeness” (Phil 2: 7) amid “an evil and adulterous generation” (Mt 12: 39). He was like a grain of wheat fallen onto the ground (Jn 12: 24).

Rationale: Adam and Christ are both alone and this is not good.

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3. Creation of woman – the help

Genesis creation is such that, contrary to what happens in ordinary life, woman is made through man – the first woman is out of the first man! As it is written: “The Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept. Then he took one of his sides […] and built a woman” (Gen 2: 21-22).  Dually, the new creation in Christ (2 Cor 5: 17) is such that the Church is built from the pierced side of Christ:

“It was from the side of Christ as He slept the sleep of death upon the cross that there came forth the wondrous sacrament of the whole Church” (Sacrosantum Concilium 5).

Can you believe it? Woman is built from man both in Genesis and the Gospels. And this fact is so important for any Christian communities that Saint Paul records it at least twice: “Man is not out of woman, but woman out of man. For man was not made through woman but woman through man” (1 Cor 11: 8-9). And again, “Adam was formed first, then Eve” (1Tim 2: 13).

Rationale: God creates the first woman and the Church as an architect. He uses material taken out of the side of man. The first woman is built (banah) by God through the first Adam (Gen 2: 22), just like the Church is built by God through the last Adam, who is Christ (Jn 19: 31-37; 1Jn 5: 6-12).

4. Marriage

Genesis marriage is such that “a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Gen 2: 24). The first man and his help, that is, the first woman, were created to be joined together in one flesh. Gospel marriage, likewise, is illustrated with Jesus’s teaching on divorce: “Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?  So, they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate” (Mt 19: 4-6).

Rationale: The first woman and the first man were not meant to be separate in the flesh. Sin introduced hostility, a sort of “dividing wall” (Eph 2: 14), between man and woman.

5. Naming

Adam named her help woman (Gen 2: 23). He did that right after God created her from his side. But then, the woman took the forbidden fruit from the tree, ate it and gave it to her man. Sin, so to speak, divorced man and woman causing the first man to rename her help. He called her Eve, the mother of all the living (Gen 3: 20). And name is destiny in the Bible; in fact, God’s will for the first man, who is made out of dust, is that he eats in toil and returns to the ground: “You are dust and to dust you shall return” (Gen 3: 19), while his will for the first woman, who is the mother of all the living, is that she be ruled over by her husband and “bring forth children in pain” (Gen 3: 16).

In a rather similar way, also Christ names his mother twice. Indeed, Christ hanging from the tree of the cross called the Virgin Mary first woman (Jn 19: 26 and cf. Jn 2: 4) and then mother of the disciple whom he loved (Jn 19: 27). God’s will for his Christ, the last Adam, is that he be dead on the cross, be buried, and be raised at the right hand of the Father, whereas his will for the new Eve is that she be pierced by a sword (Lk 2: 35) and become the mother of any disciples whom Jesus loves (Jn 19, 27).  

Rationale: Adam and Eve were disjoined due to original sin. Sin divorced them. Now, Christ and the Church are likely to have been separate in the flesh during the last two thousand years for the very same reason. Let me spell it out for you: S_I_N. Christ and the Church, that is to say, man and woman, the clergy and the lay people are all meant to be “one flock, one shepherd” (Jn 10: 16).

Three-step discussion

Christ is the last Adam, the source of grace. Since “we must know Christ as the source of grace in order to know Adam as the source of sin” (CCC 388), let’s see how that act of knowing might work.

First step. Knowledge is a spiritual process in the Scriptures and it calls for love. If you love Christ, the Word goes down into your flesh up till it makes you one with what you’re knowing. Your flesh gradually becomes “the temple of his body” (Jn 2: 21). Jesus himself testifies to that:

“Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them” (Jn 14: 23).  

To know Christ means to love him so as to become joined together and be known, that is, loved: “Anyone who loves God is known by him” (1Cor 8: 3). The disciple Jesus loves is likely to be any person who loves/knows Christ and is loved/known by him in turn.  To any such persons, Christ says:

“Behold your Mother!” (Jn 19: 27).

Second step. The source of grace is Christ; more precisely, his pierced side: “It was from the side of Christ as He slept the sleep of death upon the cross that there came forth the wondrous sacrament of the whole Church” (SC 5). What comes out of Christ’s side, that is, water and blood, Baptism and Eucharist, the sacrament of the whole Church, is the material out of which God builds the new woman. The new woman is the Church. Opposite to Eve, she doesn’t use her power to be like God without God. Rather, she uses it to help humankind to become God by way of God’s renewed grace:

“The Word became flesh to make us partakers of the divine nature. The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made human, might make humans gods” (CCC 460).

The Church is subject to Christ and her job is to give birth to and nurture the children of God. The Church is the wife of Christ - the last Adam, the new man. And she knows that Adam, our old man, the body of sin, was crucified with Christ:

“Our old man was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.” (Rm 6: 6). In other words, God “made him, who knew no sin, to be sin for our sake, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (2Cor 5: 21).

Third step. While hanging from the cross, Christ loved us once and for all. Indeed, while he was “lifted up from the earth” (Jn 12: 32), he shed blood and water and Spirit to present the Church to himself in glory, as his own glorius flesh. In Saint Paul's words:

“Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her [...] so as to present the Church to himself in splendour, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind—yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands (read: those who have authority over any Christian communities, that is, the clergy) should love their wives (read: any Christian communities) as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the Church, because we are members of his body (read: the glorious Church in heaven). For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This is a great mystery, and I speak in regard to Christ and the Church” (Eph 5: 25. 27-32).

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Conclusions

The traditional stance on Adam and Christ is that they are males. I’ve exploited such gendered tradition to show that the Church has been built with what sprang from the side of Christ, the last Adam, just as Eve was built with what was taken out of Adam.  I’ve then illustrated that crucified Christ released the grace enabling the new woman to become one flesh with the new man. Actually, Risen Christ and the glorious Church are one flesh in heaven already. They are simply waiting that the clergy and the lay people get rid of the dividing wall too and become “one flock, one shepherd” (Jn 10: 16).

I've elsewhere argued [1] that, if we want divorce to be banned from Christian communities, the great mystery of Chirst and the Church must take place at Mass and man's help - that is, woman - is needed right within the clergy:

“It was because of the hardness of your heart that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but at the beginning it was not so” (Mt 19: 8).

"And you who were once estranged and hostile in your rational thinking, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, so as to present you holy and without a spot and irreproachable before him” (Col 1: 20-22).

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NOTES

[1] See The New Commandment, Is God male or female? and Damiani (2019).

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REFERENCES

CCC, Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992, 1997), Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis (2018), available at https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM

SC, Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), Pope Paul VI, available at https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_sacrosanctum-concilium_en.html

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