Jamin Bradley

I was reading Absolute Wonder Woman recently when I came across a very powerful image of Holy Week’s “Silent Saturday.” In this series, Wonder Woman is pulled into the underworld to face Hades. After being there for some time, she begins to be pulled out of the underworld against Hades’ will.

“How is she this powerful?” Hades asks.

“You know why I am so powerful,” replies Diana. “It’s because keeping me here is unjust. It is shameful and everyone who knows of it knows the truth of this injustice. And it demands a reckoning.”

Long ago, Satan gained the power of death when humans chose to listen to him and sin, making him the little-g-god of this world and the lord of death. Since that time, sin and death have gone together. Since all humans sin, all humans are turned over to death.

When God put on flesh and came to us as Jesus, Satan tried to increase his power through him. If Satan could get the big-G-god of the universe to sin and worship him, the cosmos would be restructured. But despite the many great temptations he faced, Jesus refused to do this.

Jesus had a plan to take the power of death away from Satan. He knew the way that Satan worked: stealing, killing, and destroying. This is Satan’s default mode, so Jesus used it to his advantage and baited Satan. He knew that if Satan couldn’t have his worship and partnership, Satan would eventually come and kill him.

And that’s exactly what he did.

Satan entered into Judas and put into play the death of Jesus. He was so used to humans sinning and dying that he never stopped to realize that he had just orchestrated the death of a sinless man. Satan was in for a rude awakening when Jesus entered the underworld with no record of sin. Sin and death go together, so Satan could only rightly bring humans into the underworld if they sinned. But since Jesus never sinned, Satan was found to have abused his power of death. In light of this injustice, the power of the little-g-god defaulted back to the big-G-god, and Jesus entered the resurrection.

Perhaps Jesus might have said something similar to Satan that Diana said to Hades: “Keeping me here is unjust. It is shameful and everyone who knows of it knows the truth of this injustice. And it demands a reckoning.”