CHRIST IS THE NEW ADAM June 21, 2026
St. Paul in today’s 2nd reading from the Epistle to the Romans contrasts Our Lord with Adam, the first man. Strictly speaking, Paul does more than contrast them; he explains that Christ is the New Adam.
To understand what he means we have first to recollect what Adam is. Adam is the originator of the entire human race. We talk about the human race and mankind as a single entity. But we can only do this truly if we are all, ultimately, descended from one man and one woman. This is what the Church believes and teaches. There is no sense in speaking about the unity of the human race unless all human beings are actually of one and the same physical stock. Because of Adam, we are all “men” by race. Because of the same Adam, we are all born alienated from our Creator by Adam’s sin, also known as “original sin”. “Sin entered into the world through one man”, says St. Paul. Since they were so close to God before the Fall, Adam and Eve could not easily be made to sin against God. But once they had been brought to disobey God, all subsequent sin became ever easier. So it is that Adam, Eve and all their descendants since the fall will find until the end of the world that it is very difficult not to sin. Moreover, there is a further dreadful consequence of sin, which mars God’s image in us all—that is death. St. Paul explains that “Death has spread through the whole human race because everyone has sinned”.
Yet though sin and death are still so much in evidence in our world, nonetheless, St. Paul says that “the gift considerably outweighed the fall”. In other words, Christ’s death and resurrection did not simply reverse or undo the harm of Adam’s sin, but far surpassed it in merit and power. St. Paul summarises this today when he says that “If it is certain that through one man’s fall so many died, it is even more certain that divine grace, coming through the one man, Jesus Christ, came to so many as an abundant free gift.”
It is both the gratuity and the abundance of this gift that amazes St. Paul, and must amaze us too when we stop to reflect on it. God could have abandoned us as a failed experiment. Yet He chose not simply to rescue us, but to do so at the price of His own Son’s suffering as the New Adam, and by that means to re-shape fallen man in His own Son’s glorious image, making us fit by grace for the future glory of heaven. ~ Fr. Paul Dobson.
