Christ's Death on the Cross

Section 3: The Concrete Realization of Christ’s Vicarious Atonement

In the two preceding Sections we have shown that the atonement was real and intrinsically as well as extrinsically perfect. The question now arises: What were the specific actions by which the Godman made satisfaction for our sins? Or, to express it in simpler terms, How did Christ redeem us? We pray: “By Thy holy Cross Thou hast redeemed the world.” This does not imply that our Divine Saviour’s previous actions had no reference to the purpose of the Redemption. His whole life, from His conception to His death on the Cross, was a chain of expiatory actions, each in itself sufficient to redeem the world in actu primo. But it was an essential feature of the scheme of salvation that in actu secundo, i.e., actually, no satisfaction was acceptable but that which had its consummation in the tragedy on Golgotha.

In the present Section, therefore, we shall first treat of Christ’s Death on the Cross (Article 1) and then of two subsequent events of peculiar soteriological import, viz.: His Descent into Hell (Article 2) and His Glorious Resurrection (Article 3).

Article 1: Christ’s Death on the Cross

We are here considering the death of our Divine Redeemer not as a sacrifice, but merely as the means of our salvation. It was by His passion and death that Jesus actually redeemed mankind. The circumstance that His death was a bloody sacrifice constitutes Him a priest; this aspect of the matter will receive due attention in Part II, Chapter I, infra.

1. Christ’s Death the Efficient Cause of Our Redemption

In view of the central position which the Cross of Christ occupies in the history of the Redemption, the Tridentine Council asserted a truth self-evident to every Christian when it defined: “Of this justification the causes are these: the final cause indeed is the glory of God and of Jesus Christ, … while the efficient cause is a merciful God; … but the meritorious cause is His most beloved only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who … merited justification for us by His most holy Passion on the wood of the Cross and made satisfaction for us to God the Father.”¹

So important a dogma must loom large in the New Testament and be at least foreshadowed in the Old.

a) Apart from certain Old Testament types (such as the sacrifice of Isaac, the scapegoat, the brazen serpent, etc.),² the Messianic prophecies afford numerous intimations of the bloody passion and death of the future Messias. Most of these occur in the prophecies of Isaias and the Book of Psalms. Isaias, in speaking of the satisfaction rendered by the “servant of the Lord,”³ invariably describes it as a dolorous passion followed by death.⁴ The 21st Psalm characterizes salvation as the outcome of intense tribulation and suffering. “But I am a worm, and no man; the reproach of men, and the outcast of the people. All they that saw me have laughed me to scorn: they have spoken with the lips, and wagged the head… . My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue hath cleaved to my jaws: and thou hast brought me down into the dust of death… . They have dug my hands and feet. They have numbered all my bones. And they have looked and stared upon me. They parted my garments amongst them; and upon my vesture they cast lots.”⁵

b) The New Testament fairly swarms with passages in support of the dogma. Christ Himself says: “Filius hominis non venit ministrari, sed ministrare, et dare animam suam redemptionem⁶ pro multis—The Son of man is not come to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a redemption for many.”⁷ And again: “Sic enim Deus dilexit mundum, ut Filium suum unigenitum daret,⁸ ut omnis qui credit in eum, non pereat, sed habeat vitam aeternam—God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believeth in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting.”⁹ St. Paul attests the same truth in somewhat different terms. “Qui etiam proprio Filio suo non pepercit,” he says, “sed pro nobis omnibus tradidit¹⁰ illum—He spared not even his own Son, but delivered him up for us all.”¹¹ The notion that Christ died for us on the Cross assumes concrete form in the shedding of His blood “unto the remission of sins.”¹² Hence the well-known Pauline axiom, “Sine sanguinis effusione non fit remissio¹³—Without shedding of blood there is no remission.”¹⁴ Therefore, too, subjective salvation, i.e., the application of the fruits of the Redemption to the individual soul, is described as “the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ,”¹⁵ and the Redemption was not “consummated” until Christ gave up the ghost.¹⁶

2. The Congruity of Christ’s Death on the Cross

It was fitting that Christ should die for us on the Cross. The reasons are admirably developed by St. Thomas.¹⁷ We must confine ourselves to a summary of the most important of them.

a) It would have been unbecoming for the Redeemer to die of old age or disease,¹⁸ or to fall beneath the blows of an assassin. His high office as Saviour of the human race demanded that He should die a public death. In no other way could He have so effectively sealed the truth of His teaching. Nothing could have been more conducive to the spread of His Gospel than His bloody martyrdom, which contained within itself the proof of His teaching and power. The fact that He met death unflinchingly gained for Him a greater number of enthusiastic adherents than many years of teaching could have done. What is the poison cup that Socrates put to his lips in comparison with the agony suffered by Jesus Christ? His reward was proportionate to the magnitude of His suffering. This consideration (namely, that He merited His glorification by intense suffering) implies a profound teleology, which may be truly termed divine.

b) In regard to those for whom He gave up His life, Christ could not have selected a more congruous manner of dying than that which He actually chose. The path of Christian perfection runs between two poles—hatred of sin and the practice of virtue. From both points of view the cruel drama enacted on Golgotha was eminently effective. The power of sin could not be broken except by a strong opposing force. This may be regarded either objectively or subjectively.

(α) The sin of our first parents had doomed the human race to spiritual death, a terrible penalty which entailed the death of the body.¹⁹ Hence it was eminently proper that our Divine Redeemer should by His bodily death destroy the spell of spiritual death and thereby restore man to that corporeal immortality which had been one of the prerogatives of the human race in Paradise, but was forfeited by sin. There is a striking parallel also between the first sinner’s desire to be like unto God and the self-humiliation of the Godman, between the “tree of knowledge” and the “wood of the Cross.” The antithesis between Christ’s passion and death on the one hand, and sin on the other, may be traced in detail. Thus the unholy trinity of vices which we have inherited from our first parents—concupiscence of the eyes, concupiscence of the flesh, and pride of life—received a tremendous blow by the bitter passion and death of our Saviour,—concupiscence of the eyes in the distribution of his garments, concupiscence of the flesh in His disrobing and scourging, and pride of life in the imposition of the thorny crown and the crucifixion.

(β) Nothing could produce a more impressive idea of the hideousness of sin than the contemplation of the mangled and blood-stained body of our crucified Redeemer.²⁰ It is apt to soften the hardest of hearts. He who dares to offend God in plain view of the Cross is an atrocious villain, because, in the words of St. Paul, he does not shrink from again “crucifying the Son of God and making him a mockery.”²¹ The height of contemplation and the heroic practice of virtue to which the medieval mystics attained by meditating on the cruel sufferings of our Divine Redeemer, have been and still are within the reach of all men. Like St. John many have found by experience that love kindles love. “In this is charity: not as though we had loved God, but because he hath first loved us, and sent his Son to be a propitiation for our sins.”²²

Our crucified Redeemer is, moreover, a living and attractive model of all virtue. How would it be possible for us poor weak mortals to be virtuous had we not His glorious example to encourage us? Is there anything a selfish, effeminate man dreads more than pain and death? Yet the Passion of Christ has deprived both of their sting. St. Teresa had no other desire than either to die or to suffer (aut mori aut pati). Death, too, so terrible to human nature, has lost its horrors. With the crucifix clasped in his hands and the name of the Redeemer on his lips, the pious Christian calmly commends his soul to the Heavenly Father. In the Cross there is salvation, the Cross is a haven of refuge.²³