When we use the word victory, most of us instinctively think of a greater strength defeating a lesser strength: A stronger army overruns a weaker one. A better argument crushes the opposition. A greater force overpowers a lesser force.
So when we hear that Christ “defeated” sin and death, it is automatic to imagine a cosmic contest, God stronger than the devil, Jesus finally wins.
But what if that instinct says more about how we understand power than about how the Cross actually works?
There are two ways to imagine what happened.
The first is through the lens of dominance.
In this view, evil is a treated as a force that must be conquered. The Cross becomes the decisive blow. Jesus wins because He is stronger. It feels dramatic. It feels triumphant. It feels familiar because it mirrors the way we naturally understand contest and victory.
The other possibility is liberation.
In this view, evil is not a rival equal to God. It is distortion. It is parasitic. It feeds on fear, retaliation, and accusation. On the Cross, Jesus does not retaliate. He does not escalate.
He does not feed violence with greater violence. Rather, He absorbs it. He allows betrayal, injustice, mockery, and torture to do their worst.
And then, when nothing more can be done to counter what is being done to Him, death exhausts itself. Death collapses. Death returns to what it is, a house of cards, from structure to a flattened incoherence. And what remains is life.
“Death has been swallowed up in victory,” Paul writes. Not because death was crushed by a larger weapon, but because death could not hold what was truly alive, what has always been alive. And this is true because unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.
In that image, death is not defeated by domination. Death is passed through. And on the other side of its exhaustion, something new emerges. Resurrection is not the final score that God wins. It is what has always been true and what remains when death is no longer present. And when death is no longer present there is liberation to live life. Jesus called it much fruit.
So perhaps the real question is not whether Christ won. Perhaps we should ask how to understand this win. Was it dominance over a weaker power? Or was it love refusing the terms of domination until evil collapsed under its own weight?
When you think about the Cross, do you imagine a power over or a freeing from? Which vision of power shapes the way you live?