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Late in his life, St. John Henry Newman declined an offer from a Protestant to explain the Atonement fully. He replied that the Atonement is a theological mystery, far too complicated to be reduced to human reason. He was correct. The reason there are many competing (sometimes only partial) explanations for how Jesus Christ made us sinners at-one again with the Father is that it is complex—both literally and figuratively a thorny topic.
The literal thorns can stand in for the figurative ones. Granted that God is all-powerful and all-wise, couldn’t He have devised a plan for Christ to save us without the misery?
Twenty-first-century people hear the word “passion” and think of an overwhelming desire for a particular action. “Zeke does like to play basketball, but his passion is baking.” Yet, when we talk about the passion of the Christ, we are talking about the older meaning: something one undergoes, endures, bears the weight of, suffers. Passion in that older sense is the thorny part. Why did Jesus have to suffer so?
In an absolute philosophical sense, we can answer this easily. He didn’t have to suffer. There is no law over God binding Him to redeem us in any particular way. In his Summa Theologiae III, Q. 46, St. Thomas Aquinas quotes St. Augustine’s On the Trinity
We assert that the way whereby God deigned to deliver us by the man Jesus Christ, who is mediator between God and man, is both good and befitting the Divine dignity; but let us also show that other possible means were not lacking on God’s part, to whose power all things are equally subordinate.
As with all God’s actions, we can say God’s way to redeem us is “good” and “befitting the Divine dignity,” but we cannot say God was obligated to do it. Many people do not accept this claim. They argue that if God could have done it another way, He should have done it another way. They reason that, if God chose this bloody means of redeeming us, He is cruel and abusive.
The scriptural evidence makes clear that this was the Divine plan. When St. Peter preaches to the assembled Jews in Jerusalem at Pentecost, he tells them that “this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23). Note here that this was part of God’s plan, but the act of killing was that of lawless men. This perhaps helps us see a bit of the mystery.
Many Christians have encountered an explanation of the Atonement known as “penal substitutionary atonement” that was developed during the Protestant Reformation and after by, especially, Calvinist and Calvinist-leaning thinkers. Insofar as this theory focuses on Christ as a substitute for us, suffering for us, and doing what we cannot do, it is fully biblical. It leans on scriptural passages indicating that Jesus made a vicarious sacrifice for us. For instance, St. Paul tells us that the human race is fallen in sin, and that redemption is found “in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (Rom. 3:24-25). An “expiation” is a sacrifice of atonement. The entire Catholic Tradition is clear that the Atonement is because of Christ, who was sacrificed according to God’s plan for us.
Further, they are correct that this sacrifice involves the Incarnate Son’s mysteriously taking on the curse of sin for us. St. Paul writes in Galatians 3:13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed be every one who hangs on a tree.’” (He is alluding to Deuteronomy 21:23, which says “a hanged man is accursed by God.”) In 2 Corinthians 5:21, the Apostle writes, more mysteriously, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
What does it mean that Jesus was cursed? Further, what does it mean to be “made sin”?
Obviously, we are in very deep waters here. It is the “penal,” or punishment, part of the theory that makes it much harder to see how God’s plan is both good and consistent with God’s dignity. The late Calvinist theologian R. C. Sproul described this punishment in this way: “It was as if there was a cry from heaven, excuse my language, but I can be no more accurate than to say it was as if God Jesus heard the words, ‘God, damn you.’ Because that’s what it meant to be cursed, to be damned, to be under the anathema of the Father.”
While it is clear that retributive punishment is just and part of divine justice, part of the problem here is that those who say Jesus satisfied God’s justice interpret Jesus’ sufferings, particularly His mental sufferings, as part of a direct divine action by the Father. The idea of sacrifice here is that God the Father is directly punishing the Incarnate Son. Some proponents of this view will even interpret Christ’s quotation of Psalm 22: 1 on the Cross as literal. When Jesus cries out in Matthew 27:46, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” some will say that God the Father actually abandoned Jesus.
This does not make sense theologically. God the Son took on a full human nature, body and soul. At no time did He abandon body or soul, even when they were separated. If the Holy Trinity is not divisible, there is no way for God the Father to curse or abandon God the Son. God cannot curse or abandon God.
It also frames Jesus’ suffering as a matter of God directly exacting a retributive punishment that Jesus did not deserve. This does indeed make God seem cruel.
A better way to think about Jesus’ sacrifice and the suffering involved is to consider the suffering of Christ as what was going to happen to the perfect man in a sinful world. God’s will is for our good and flourishing. Sin is a preference for our own will over God’s will. Sin alienates us from God—and that means alienating us from the world He created for us, each other, and indeed ourselves. This alienation is the punishment and brings on further punishment in the form of every kind of societal and internal disorder.
Jesus Christ, completely united to God and to Man in Himself, suffers in His human nature the feelings of alienation and the results of a world of sinners who truly hate those who remind them of their wrong. “Fully integrated in himself because sin has not infected him,” Fr. Roch Kereszty wrote in his book Jesus Christ: Fundamentals of Christology, “Jesus subjects himself to God with an undivided heart.” His sacrifice, which is not limited to the Cross, but extends throughout every moment of His life, is to offer Himself freely to God the Father in every aspect of His existence—no matter the cost.
The Epistle to the Hebrews explains how the old Law, which is “but a shadow” of the New, points to Christ’s true and enduring sacrifice, which is not about sacrifices and offerings, but something deeper. It quotes our Lord, “Then I said, ‘Lo, I have come to do thy will, O God,’ as it is written of me in the roll of the book” (Heb. 10:7).
Christ’s sacrifice is not constituted by suffering, destruction, or even death, but by a complete renunciation of human desires unless they match with God’s, including the desires to be loved, liked, and respected. Even including the desire for self-preservation. In the Garden of Gethsemane, we see that Christ still has that last desire—and experiences the perfectly human anxiety in renouncing it.
It is this offering of His own will that constitutes the perfect satisfaction of God’s justice and love. Though not guilty of any crime or sin, Jesus faces the full weight of human punishment for it. And it is because of His perfect knowledge of the horrors of sin that his deepest suffering takes place. As Fr. Kereszty puts it, “Jesus alone carries the full burden of our sins in the sense that, through his divine compassion and holiness, he alone experiences the evil of our sins in their full gravity.”
St. Augustine says that “[t]here was no other more suitable way of healing our misery” than this way. Why? There are too many reasons to recount here. We can mention two.
The first is that this “unnecessary” suffering with us shows us the depths of God’s love in a way nothing else can. Second, however, it shows Christians the way we must act. Because Christ’s sacrifice was accepted, and He has risen, ascended into Heaven, and sent His Spirit in us, we, too, are at-one with the Father and can choose His will no matter the cost.
(Editor’s note: This essay appeared originally in The Catholic Servant and is reprinted with their kind permission.)
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