Transcript

The Catholic Church confesses that Jesus Christ is true God and true man.

The Church also professes in the Nicene Creed that Jesus Christ was crucified under Pontius Pilate, died, and was buried.

Why would God become man and suffer death by public crucifixion?

Why would God allow Him to self to undergo a kind of public humiliation and human agony, and to be unrecognized by many of his contemporaries?

Well, there's a number of interrelated answers to this question.

The first answer is that God became man and suffered the mystery of the Cross in order to reveal to us who He truly is, the Holy Trinity, a communion of persons, and the God of love.

The Father manifests Himself to us by sending the Son into the world to redeem us from our sins.

The Son reveals Himself to us through His human self-offering to the Father on our behalf in holiness and love, in humility and in compassion.

The Spirit is revealed to us when He is sent by the Father and the Son upon the human race after the resurrection of Jesus from the dead to heal and sanctify us.

So the Cross reveals the Trinity.

A second answer is that God, in his human suffering on the Cross, shows his deep solidarity with us, especially his preferential love for those who are forgotten, oppressed, or downtrodden.

God identifies with the poor of this world, spiritually and materially.

God identifies with the lowly in humility.

A third answer is that the crucifixion manifests God's hidden power as Creator and Redeemer.

Since He was able to take upon Himself what was worst, death and the consequences of our human sin, and to triumph over it in the power of the resurrection and in the forgiveness of sins.

Consequently, nothing can separate us from the love of God.

You might say in the Cross and resurrection, it's been manifest that the love of God is victorious over all things by the power of God.

We can also speak about the mystery of the atonement effected by Christ's self-offering.

Atonement is actually an English word from the 16th century meaning at-one-ment, or reconciliation, that which reconciles us to God.

How does Christ's death help us have communion with God?

The most prominent theory in the Catholic tradition comes from St. Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century.

Anselm notes that man's sin has alienated him from God.

We have forsaken God and given offense to His infinite goodness and justice.

But God does not abandon us.

Rather, He takes upon Himself a human nature in Christ so as to live out a human life of obedience and charity and justice on our behalf.

You might say God became one of us so as to heal our human condition from within.

In other words, Christ as true man is our brother.

He's one like us, but unlike us, he's without sin.

And he can offer his life to God on our behalf in reparation for our sins.

But Christ is also true God, and so His human self-offering to the Father has an infinite dignity and worth.

There's a mysterious depth to the human offering of Christ because of His mysterious divine identity.

Therefore, His love and obedience as man restores communion between God and man.

It makes satisfaction or proportionate reparation for all human sins.

The offering Christ makes to the Father on our behalf at the Cross is greater than all sins in its proportionate goodness.

So it's able to atone for everything if we have recourse to the grace and life of Christ.

We should note that this Catholic understanding differs greatly from that of penal substitution theory, which was central to the thought of both Martin Luther and John Calvin.

On that view, Christ was deemed by God the guilt-bearer of our sins, taking upon Himself the wrath of God at the Cross and even experiencing the pains of hell for our sake.

This is not the mainstream Catholic view.

The Catholic Church traditionally maintains, in accord with scripture, that Christ did submit to some of the punishments of original sin for our sake, namely, our human form of suffering and death.

And it is in this sense that He was made sin for us, according to St. Paul.

Furthermore, he did substitute Himself for our sake, but this substitution is positive.

He offers His love and obedience to the Father in sinlessness where we have failed to do so.

Christ Himself cannot suffer rupture with God, the state of damnation, or be deemed a true subject of guilt or wrongdoing because He's innocent and He's one in being with God.

Christ suffered greatly in His Passion for the sake of the human race.

Thomas Aquinas notes that Jesus suffered in His bodily senses, His human emotions, His mind, and His will.He suffered intense physical pain in the tortures of the crucifixion where nails pierced very sensitive parts of the body.

He suffered emotionally from the agonies of death, the fact that He was rejected by the religious leaders of His people, from the betrayal of His disciples, from the pain inflicted upon His mother and other loyal friends.

Most of all, though, He suffered s- interiorly in his mind and heart.

With the mysterious elevated knowledge Christ possessed as man, He knew all men and needed no one to bear witness of man for He Himself knew what was in man according to John chapter two.

On the cross, Christ confronted the magnitude of our sin and the hell of human beings who separate themselves from God.

Saint Thomas teaches that the contrition of heart that Christ experienced on behalf of human beings was greater than that of any contrition for sins present in any saint.

In other words, Christ grieved for our sin on the cross and He confronted the gravity of human sin in a way the rest of us are incapable of doing because of the magnitude of Christ's prophetic knowledge and insight.

In other words, Christ knew us and He knew our sins.

At the cross, He grieved in charity for the human race, interceding on our behalf.

At the same time, Christ was consoled by the peace of His immediate knowledge of God and His union with the Father.

He was able to offer His life for the world in majestic peacefulness.

As it says in Luke's Gospel in chapter 23, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Into thy hands I commit my spirit.

And in John 19, Jesus says from the cross, It is finished, or accomplished.

There's that great solemn peacefulness of the soul of Christ united with His Father who gives His life for the sins of the world in the victory of love.

Christ died on the Sabbath, a Friday afternoon, and was buried in the tomb that day.

During the time that He was dead, His body and soul remained the body and soul of the incarnate Word.

That is to say, the body and soul of the divine Son who truly experienced death.

On Easter night, by the power of God who is omnipotent, Christ was raised bodily from the dead.

What does that mean?

In the physical resurrection, Christ's body and soul are reunited so that he enjoys forever a unity of body and soul.

Christ is human now and forever in the glory of the resurrection.

His body is glorified, that's to say transformed and exalted.

He still possesses a physical human body, but it now enjoys the state of being that is far more elevated.

It's the beginning of a new universe that is being remade.

The physical resurrection of Christ is the sign of a new creation in the age that is to come.

That's why Saint Paul describes Him as the last Adam in First Corinthians 15.

Jesus is now free from suffering and death.

His body is perfectly subject to His soul, and in this way, it's more perfectly spiritualized.

He still has a real physical material body, but it's been changed by the glorification.

That is an anticipation of the new creation that is to come.

Christ risen from the dead appeared to His disciples over the course of 50 days under mysterious circumstances so as to teach them the reality of His bodily resurrection.

And Christ resurrected now is present mysteriously to the Church, especially in the Sacrament of the Eucharist so that we too can encounter His presence as one risen from the dead.

This too is given to us in faith, to know Christ raised from the dead, especially in the blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist.

Our Christian baptism and the grace that it gives us invites us to conform our own lives to the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ.

In this life, you and I are subject to suffering and death, but we can now pass through these experiences united to Christ and fortified by His grace, won for us by His passion.

Furthermore, the Catholic Church teaches that we can and should offer both our joys and our sufferings to God out of love, motivated by the charity of Christ poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

In other words, we can be united to Christ in our suffering and death, one with Him in faith, hope, and charity as living members of His mystical body.

The cross is for us so that we can live out the victory of Christ in our own lives.

He alone has atoned for human sins once and for all, but He communicates His life of grace to us precisely in and through our own experience of death so as to invite us into the life of the resurrection.

As Paul says in Romans 6, For if we have been united with Him in a death like His, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His.

Our next session will discuss the person of the Holy Spirit.