The sacrifice for another may seem “madness,” but it is a noble madness. If it is God who gives Himself, why incarnate and die in that way? The key —the text holds— lies in human freedom and in the concrete way God saves without violating it.
III
Once that truth about the general goodness of sacrifice for others is established, the most serious objections arise in the case of Christ. If a man dies for another, it is meritorious, agreed. But if it is God who does it, it will be said to be absurd; and if moreover He carries it out through suffering, which is also cruel, repellent, and sadomasochistic. Why did He have to accomplish that salvation through a bloody and scandalous procedure? Was He not God; could He not spare us such a desolate reference as the figure of a crucified man? If He created us with a Word, why did He not redeem us with just another Word, pronounced from the incorruptible glory of Heaven? Why did that Word have to become incarnate, live as a man, and die in such an ignominious way? In short, if a human hero could achieve the same results by other means (that is, without his bloody immolation), would his sacrifice unto death not be not only a useless waste but an act that is strictly cruel, repellent, and sadomasochistic? Is God not omnipotent? Why not save us directly through a mere fiat?
The objections raised are powerful, but let us try to reach the heart of the problem. First of all, the expiation of our sins wrought by Jesus Christ would be incomprehensible if we disregard the most essential aspect of human nature: its freedom. Human freedom is the necessary condition not only to understand the nature of man (and the sin that separates us from God) but also all the actions of God, who is absolute goodness, justice, and omnipotence. God creates us free because if man were not, we could not say that God is good, since freedom is the sister of dignity and “one of the most precious gifts that the heavens gave to men” (Quijote II, 58). To create a man without freedom is to reduce him to a mere irrational animal or a robot; to take away his freedom is to degrade him to the condition of a slave. God does not do the former because He desires to bestow upon us the maximum dignity as creatures (and that is only possible by being rational and free). And He does not do the latter because He is infinitely good.
But that divine will to create us free has its risk, which God has assumed and resolved from His eternity. Being free, we can turn away from God and that would be (is) a tragedy. Moreover, that freedom can lead us to the unimaginable sin of coming to crucify the Son of God if He becomes one of us. However, God’s omnipotence must tolerate man’s autonomous decision so as not to compromise His goodness and His justice.
We know from Scripture that God desires to save us all (1 Tim. 2, 4) (Tit. 2, 11), but God does not want, to preserve His goodness, to violate our freedom. He cannot redeem us through some kind of amnesty since His justice would be broken if He granted the gift of salvation to someone who obstinately rejects Him. To God, on the other hand, “no one has ever seen” (Jn. 1, 18), for if He were to manifest Himself empirically, He would destroy by His irresistibility not only human freedom but even life (no one can see me and remain alive, the Bible warns us -Ex. 33,20-). Faced with so many difficulties, how can God Himself save us, bridging the infinite abyss with sinful man?
Divine Wisdom, however, found the most beautiful way out of this soteriological labyrinth, thus untying the knot that bound our salvation. The Holy Fathers summarized it with a luminous phrase: what is not assumed cannot be redeemed. For that reason, God becomes man “in all things like us, except sin“ (Hb. 4, 15), to carry out through the greatest human example of love (dying for someone), an action that only divinity can perform: the redemption of all humanity, excluding no one.
Christ -perfect God and perfect man, in all things like us except sin-, gives Himself totally as man, and extends the effect of His offering to all as God.
The mysterious and all-powerful Deus absconditus (Is. 45,15), out of rigorous respect for human freedom and dignity, does not intervene directly in an immediate and supreme saving act with a mere let it be done. Rather, He introduces Himself gradually and progressively into human history, revealing Himself in the Word of the Law and the Prophets, until the moment when “the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, the glory of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” (Jn. 1, 14). And just as a man can give his life for a helpless shipwrecked person, the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross “saved the flooded earth once again, guiding the just one on a despised piece of wood” (Sab. 10, 4).
He did it in the way that a man’s love reaches its greatest potential: dying for the neighbor, giving everything for others, absolute coherence of what is revealed by a God who is love. (1 Jn. 4,8) and who became incarnate with the sole purpose of dying for us (give His life as a ransom for many -Mc. 10,45-). What Divine Wisdom cannot do as God –show Himself to men, be seen in His essence as “salvation which You have prepared before the face of all peoples” (Lc. 2, 31)-, He accomplishes as man, because God cannot die (not even out of love), but man can sacrifice himself, since “no one has greater love than the one who lays down his life for his friends” (Jn. 15, 13). But, at the same time, as God, the efficacy of the act of that man/God is universal and absolute. He was perfect man, by giving Himself entirely out of love for His fellows; He is perfect God by extending the Grace of His salvation to all human beings who have existed on earth, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
In this way, God through Jesus Christ wanted to share our humanity to reveal to us three sublime truths that, until He came to us, the world could not even dream of: the depth and immensity of His love: for Christ “went about doing good” (Hch. 10, 38); the intensity of His commitment and His offering unto death “for the forgiveness of sins (Mt. 26, 28) ), and finally the infinite gain that awaits us through the firstfruits (1 Cor. 15, 23) of His resurrection.
The Son of God, in short, performs the greatest act of love ever to occur on earth; the most perfect sacrifice, given the fullness of all the elements involved: the sublimity of the victim (true God and true man); the dramatic deficiencies of man wounded by sin, and the sublime essence of the act: to love unto death, to suffer for love until the end. It is the manifestation of a love that –in the words of Joseph Ratzinger- “leaves nothing for itself, but gives everything” (Introduction to Christianity). Jesus left absolutely everything on the cross. He probably died naked, without even the shroud with which He is piously covered in artistic representations. He emptied Himself to give us all of His Being, as Grace, to each one of us, granting us the new divinized life that makes us children of God and saves us. He assumed our life, to redeem our lives and divinize us.
Committed, in the end, to the last breath for the cause of man, even to emptying Himself (Fil. 2, 7), He shared with us all the ravages of the misuse of our freedom: pain, humiliation, betrayal, and death. And once salvation is accomplished, all that remains for us is to receive it through living faith in charity (Gal. 5,6), for “by His wounds we have been healed” (Is. 53, 11). The delicious Tree of Good and Evil (Gen. 2, 9) –metaphor of our freedom and our misfortune- is definitively counterbalanced by the dry tree of Jesus’ cross, reality of our salvation and our blessedness.
Continues in Part IV