"As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." (1 Cor. 15:22)
These words may recall for us Handel's Messiah, or the words of the funeral service, but one thing is clear - they look forward to Easter, to the Resurrection. We shall all die, and we shall all be made alive. And we should not enquire too closely into who we "all" are!
It is certain that we all die. Dying is a fact of life. But what has that to do with Adam? In Genesis 2:17, God warns: "Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day you eat of it you shall die". Common sense tells us that this warning cannot refer to physical death. For in the first place, Adam and Eve did not die there and then. And we know that cows, trees, wasps and fish all die, even without "knowing good and evil."
On the other hand, it is obvious from Paul's description of the Resurrection to the Corinthians that he is talking of a bodily resurrection - not merely a spiritual experience, but something that involves our whole body, nose, ears and feet.
Again, common sense tells us that this is not a concrete physical event. Our corpses will have fed the worms, and anyway our bodies change between infancy and old age, and it would be ridiculous to ask what form they would have when restored - Jesus himself ridiculed the fundamentalist Sadducees who pictured such a concrete resurrection (Mat. 22:23-32), just as we should ridicule stories about people being swept up into the sky in novels based on an over-literal reading of 2 Cor. 12:2 or 1 Thess. 4:17!
Adam and Eve did not die (at least not at once), but they did sin. The serpent was right to tell Eve that her eyes and Adam's would be opened and they would become like God, knowing good and evil. This was no lie, but a distortion of the truth. For, unlike God, they lacked the power to escape the consequences of sin, the vicious circle of wrongdoing. They could recognize good, but they could not always do good.
This is human nature. We have the gift of intellect - not only the physical gift of seeing, but the metaphysical gift of understanding. The dark side of this gift is our ability to choose to do wrong. It is pointless to ask why God made us this way - choice is a gift, and if we cannot choose evil, we have no choice and we have no gift.
Through the centuries, people have tried to explain this fact of human nature. Paul in his letters hovers between the two views of his day - either we have two sides to us, a good side and an evil one, or else we have somehow inherited sinfulness. The former view ran the danger of claiming that evil had a separate existence, so the latter view was widely accepted, and developed later into a whole theology of Original Sin - an inclination to do wrong, caused by a loss of access to God's grace, crippling and impairing (or for Calvin, destroying) our free will.
In Christ this grace is restored. Through the Cross and the Empty Tomb, all of us are "made alive". In baptism we are raised with Christ (Rom. 6:3-5) - and the Nicene Creed links baptism to the forgiveness of our sins. For Christ too was "a descendant of Adam", indeed the descendant of Adam, for Adam means "human being", and Jesus was truly the Son of Man.
Jesus shared in our own suffering. He himself did not sin, but in his death he knew the full stifling force of sin. And in rising again, he showed himself as the New Adam, still scarred with the scars of the first Adam's disobedience, but sinless, and reflecting the glory of God. In the life of the Church, we share his life, and in this way, in him we are truly restored to grace - even so in Christ shall all be made alive!
HD