My friend’s sister is due to give birth, and no one is happy about it. Her baby has Trisomy 18, a fatal disease that will likely claim the infant just minutes after she is born. It seems fiendishly upside down that the baby is alive as long as she remains within her mother, but the moment she is born she will begin to die. Cutting the umbilical cord is not her liberating path to life, but a death sentence. What should be a day of joy will commence a season of mourning.

This situation would be entirely hopeless if not for Jesus. He has reversed this tragically twisted scenario with an equally ironic moment that leads in the opposite direction. Just as this baby’s birth is really a death, so Jesus’ death conceals the power of life.

God may have never appeared weaker than when Jesus hung on the cross, naked and broken and bearing the guilt of the world. But this moment of weakness was actually God’s greatest triumph, for Jesus took death with Him into the depths, and when He arose He left death in the dust. Death died in the death of Christ.

Martin Luther observed that it takes faith to believe this “theology of the cross.” Most people take a commonsense view of the world, believing that what they see is what they get. But we who interpret life through the lens of the cross learn to raise a fist of defiance at death.

It may seem that death has won, for it has taken our loved ones from us. But Jesus’ death and resurrection assure us that death does not have the last word, for the grave where we say goodbye is resurrection ground.

(My friend’s niece was born—and died—days after I wrote this devo. Her parents named her Hope.)