The Passion of Christ

If man was to be redeemed at all, it was necessary that God’s plan for human redemption be carried out. This plan involved the suffering of God-made-man in his human nature.

The plan of God for man’s redemption is most wondrous in every respect. Yet God could have willed to redeemmankind in some other way than by the Passion of Christ.

Still, there was surely no way more suitable forman’s redeeming than the way of Incarnation and Passion. For here man sees how much God loves him; man has perfect and most noble example of all the virtues; man has grace made available through Christ’s merits; man beholds the evil conqueror of his race subdued and vanquished by One who is truly man.

For many nobly symbolic reasons it was suitable that our Lord, dying for us by his own will, should have chosen the death of the cross. This mode of death was the most feared, and was considered the most degrading. To show that the upright man need fear no mode of death; to indicate that no mode of death can sully the innocent; to give full and final evidence of his love for mankind and his hatred for sin, our Lord chose the death of the cross. And since he died for all, he chose to die in the open, onan eminence, with arms outstretched to all mankind.

Christ did not endure all forms of human suffering. Hewas not, as we have seen, subject to internal ailments, to sickness or disease. His bodily suffering was externally caused. And by dying on the cross, he excluded other modes of fatal suffering,such as burning or drowning. Yet, in one sense, our Lord did endure all human suffering: (a) all types of human beings had part inafflicting him: men, women, Jews, Gentiles, friends, acquaintances,strangers, rulers, servants; (b) he endured abandonment, calumny,misrepresentation, blasphemy, insults, mockeries, despoliation even of his garments, sadness, weariness, fear, wounds, scourgings; (c)he suffered in all members of his body, and in all his bodily senses.

Christ’s suffering was the greatest of all suffering, the keenest pain. The prophet Jeremias (Lam. 1:12)foretold this fact in the cry: “O all ye that pass by the way,attend and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.” The external pains of the scourging, the crowning with thorns, and the crucifixion, were manifestly extreme. And the sadness of his perfect soul over the sins of men was the greatest distress ever humanly experienced. Our Lord’s body was most perfect, and therefore most acutely sensitive to pain. And he didnot permit study or consideration on the part of reason to allaythe bodily pangs in any manner. For our Lord suffered voluntarily to win for man the greatest benefits; he measured his sufferings to accord with their fruits. Thus our Lord’s pain in his Passion was the very greatest, the most intense, of pains.

When the body is ready by suffering to be torn from the soul, the soul itself suffers. For the soul in its essence is inthe body and in every part of the body. And, since the faculties or powers of the soul are rooted in its essence, these powers suffer too in the suffering of the soul. Hence, Christ, during his Passion, suffered in his whole soul.

Yet, despite the fact that our Lord truly suffered inhis whole soul, that soul had, throughout the Passion, the uninterrupted enjoyment of the beatific vision. There is no conflict here. Things do not block each other out unless they meet on a common plane. Thus, though love and hatred are opposites, aman may love God wholeheartedly and, at the same time, hate sinwholeheartedly. For love and hatred are not here on the same plane;they are not directed to the same thing. Hence, the wholeheartedsuffering of Christ did not come into conflict with the higher function of reason which was uninterruptedly fixed in wholeheartedfruition of the beatific vision.

The time of Christ’s suffering was divinelyarranged, and hence was most wisely chosen. Our Lord did all things in their proper season.

The same thing must be said of the place in which Christ willed to suffer. There is a manifest fitness in our Lord’s choice of Jerusalem, the city of the great temple with its divinely prescribed sacrifices, as the place for his perfect sacrifice.

Our Lord who willed to be “reputed with the wicked” (Isa. 53:12) was crucified between two thieves. It belonged to the perfection of his suffering, which was the greatest, that he should bear the insult and obloquy of being publicly executed with an ordinary group of criminals as though he were one of them. The cross of Christ, with an unrepentant sinner on one side, and a converted sinner on the other, shows thedivinely innocent judge of mankind on the judgment seat between”those on the right, and those on the left,” the saved and the rejectors of salvation, as the case will be on thelast day.

The Passion of Christ was the suffering and death of our Lord as man. We cannot say that the Godhead suffered and died. Itis perfectly true that he who died is God. But he is also man, in the unity of the divine Person of the Son. It is the divine Person in his human nature that suffers and dies. The Godhead lives, both in the body of the dead Christ on the cross,and in the separated soul of Christ in Limbo.