By RAYMOND DE SOUZA, KM
Part 11
This is a very interesting point of Catholic doctrine to investigate: to probe into Jesus’ mind to try to understand how He viewed His sacrifice.
Let us follow Him to the Garden of Gethsemane. We contemplate Him on His knees, praying to His Heavenly Father. Then He turns to the apostles and utters that groan of anguish: “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Mark 14:34).
We have no idea of the depth and magnitude of that sorrow. Of course, He could have used His divine powers to eliminate it, but He did not allow His Divinity to spare His human Heart a single pang. In simple terms, He suffered as though He were not God. More, He suffered all the more precisely because He was God, because His human mind was divinely enlightened, and His human will divinely inspired.
His human mind had before it a vision of all the torments in store for Him, and of the sins for which His Blood was to atone: Yours and mine. His human will, freely but with intense agony, consented that He should bear all that was to befall Him, and that He should feel all the shame and filth and horror of our sins.
You readers, who are fathers or mothers, just imagine for a moment how cruel your affliction would be, if word comes to you of your son’s or your daughter’s disgrace! The shame of a child’s sin stabs his poor parents to the heart. But in the case of Jesus, it was infinitely more so, because of His greater love and His greater sensitivity to everything evil. Thus it is difficult for us to picture how our sins afflicted the Hearts of our Brother Jesus and our Mother, Mary Most Holy.
That Sacred Heart, the very throne of innocence, the abundant wellspring of love, was now forced to feel all the foulness of the wicked world, and began to throb with a vehemence beyond its nature, sending forth the Blood with such violence that it burst through the pores, streaming in great drops to the ground.
He grieved for our sins and did penance for them, as though He Himself — if we dare say it — were the sinner. Mystery of mysteries! And yet, it happened in this tragic way. For our sake, as the Apostle Paul conveys, He became a thing accursed (Gal. 3:13). And on the morrow He was pushed around from court to court, buffeted, spat upon, scourged at a pillar, crowned with thorns, stripped of His clothes in the sight of His Mother and all the people and nailed to a cross.
Even though it is not Lent, we would do well to watch again the famous movie The Passion of the Christ to remember the cost of our redemption, even from the purely human point of view.
There He hung, the gentlest, the kindest, the noblest of men, as though He were a criminal whose infamous deeds had justified the utmost savagery, “despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows,” as though He were “stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. He poured out His soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet He bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors” (Isaiah 53:4-5). “It is finished” (John 19:30), He said, and, bowing His sacred head, He died.
The work for which He had come was done. He had paid the penalty for our sins, and purchased for us the privilege of becoming children of God.
We may consider Christ’s work for our salvation under four aspects: 1) as a work of satisfaction or atonement, 2) as a work of redemption or ransom, 3) as a work of merit, and 4) as a work of sacrifice.
Now let us take these aspects, one by one:
Satisfaction is a reparation, equal to the offense, made to the person offended. Its value depends on the dignity of the one who makes it. Adam, by his sin of obeying Satan and despising God, had offered a grievous insult to God. Christ, as the new Adam, the spiritual head of the human race, made satisfaction for that sin and for all the sins that had been, or would be, committed by men till the end of the world. His satisfaction, because it was of infinite value, more than sufficed for its purpose, because He, as a Divine Person, the infinitely beloved of His Father, was of infinite dignity.
Redemption or ransom is a price paid for the deliverance of a captive. Because of grievous sin, man lay under the sentence of eternal punishment, and had become a slave of the Devil, exposed to all his assaults, and powerless to obtain that divine grace by which alone he can be vanquished. Christ delivered us from this cruel bondage: He paid the full price of our liberation. God’s justice had demanded that the wrongful pleasure which men get from sin should be balanced or blotted out by its equivalent in voluntary suffering.
A work of merit is a work that gives a just claim to a supernatural reward. A supernatural reward is a blessing, happiness, or honor to which no creature, man or angel, could ever attain by his natural powers.
His work of redemption was a work of merit because a) it was the work of a living man subject to mortality; b) it was freely done: “I lay (my life) down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again” (John 10:18); c) it was a work of supreme charity: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13 ); it was commanded by the Father: Christ said in the Garden: “Not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42); d) Christ was the beloved Son of God; e) the reward, that is, the recovery of divine sonship, was promised, for He had been sent to us “that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10), that we might be made one with Him as He is one with the Father (John 17:22).
In every work of sacrifice a suitable victim is offered to God by a priest, specially appointed by Him, to express the homage which the creature owes to his Creator. The priest speaks to God in the name of the people; and the victim or gift which he places in God’s hands represents the desire of the people to give themselves to God — i.e., to surrender themselves, in loving adoration and submission, to their Lord and Creator.
Fallen man was unfit for the office of priest. Fallen man could find no suitable victim, no victim acceptable to God. Adam had made it impossible for himself and his sin-stained descendants to offer to God the supreme worship due to Him. (The priests of the Old Law were mere types or figures of Christ, and their sacrifices only shadows of the Sacrifice of the Cross.)
But Christ intervened on our behalf. He became our Priest and our Victim. As both Priest and Victim, infinitely pleasing to God, He discharged fully and perfectly the debt of worship that we owed.
Next article: The Resurrection!
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(Raymond de Souza KM is available to speak at Catholic events anywhere in the free world in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. Please email SacredHeartMedia@Outlook.com or visit www.RaymonddeSouza.com or phone 507-450-4196 in the United States.)
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