BibleProject | Holy Week & EasterSample

Dragon-Slaying Love

If you look closely, you might see a dragon lurking in the shadows during Holy Week. As you’ll see in today’s video, this snakey chaos creature shows up throughout the Bible.

On the first page of Scripture, when God tames chaos and disorder, he confines the chaos dragon to the outskirts of his good world. Sadly, a few pages later, the monster rears its ugly head with a tempting idea, convincing the first humans to reject God’s will and trust their own.

The result: Chaos, evil, and even death start infiltrating God’s good world to wreak havoc. Eventually, Jesus triumphs over the dragon, and Easter celebrates this crushing blow to the chaos creature, an attack so powerful that it promises to end evil forever.

But how exactly does Jesus slay the dragon? Not like most would expect.

Standing trial before Pilate, Jesus hears his own people screaming hatred for him, crying, “Crucify! Crucify!” (John 19:6). Instead of hating them in return, Jesus understands that they’re unaware of their evil.

Roman soldiers beat Jesus and spit in his face as they mock him: “Hail, King of the Jews!” (Matt. 27:29). They cannot see how the battered man bleeding before them is the king over all creation.

As God, Jesus has angel armies at his command, but he does not summon their power. He trusts the power of love instead. Dying on the cross, falsely convicted, he chooses stillness instead of hurting the people hurting him. “Father, forgive them,” he prays, “for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

Jesus never once fights against flesh-and-blood human beings, even if they hate him. But he isn’t afraid to destroy the chaos dragon that’s been deceiving every human being since Adam and Eve.

Easter celebrates Jesus’ victory over the chaos monster and reminds everyone that harming people never stops evil. Loving others and forgiving them like Jesus does is what delivers the crippling blow no evil can survive.

Reflection Question

• How would you describe the way Jesus fights evil in the world? What would it look like for you to join his same way of “fighting”?