Death Defeated

In these pages, I have tried to restore the story's context. I imagined the unseen rooms it might have passed through that no eyewitness could have observed, a hall in Heaven where every prayer ever whispered is received and weighed; a throne room where a Father says no to His own Son's plea for another way, and means it, grieving yet undefeated by it; and gates in the deep dark that believed themselves unbreakable, right until the moment they weren't. None of this is factual reporting; it is an imaginative effort, a novelist's attempt to get close enough to an old and sacred story to feel its warmth again, and to invite you to experience it alongside me.

I call it an epic adventure fantasy because that is, in the truest sense, what it has always been. Long before it was recited in hushed tones from behind a pulpit, this was a story about a King who crossed enemy lines alone, a rescue mission carried out at great cost, a war fought in a garden, and concluded at a grave that could not contain what it held. It features armies instructed to stand down when every instinct urges them to charge, a traitor's kiss, and a Judge who cannot bring himself to do the right thing, despite seeing it clearly before him. It includes a Devil who confuses a funeral for a coronation. If this story has begun to feel small to you, I believe it is not the story that has shrunk; rather, we have stopped examining it closely enough.

You will find creativity woven throughout, and I want to be transparent about it rather than let it hide in the background.