The Death of Our Lord

Christ died: (a) to satisfy for man who was under sentence of death by reason of the first sin; (b) to prove that heis true man; (c) to deliver man from the fear of death; (d) to teach us to die spiritually to sin; (e) to instill in us the firm hope of rising from the dead.

When our Lord died, the divinity or Godhead was not separated from the body on the cross and later in the tomb. For what is bestowed by God’s grace is never taken away except through fault; scripture says (Rom. 11:29): “The gifts and calling of God are without repentance.” The human nature, and thus the flesh of Christ, was united hypostatically or personally with the Word of God, and this union remained permanently; it couldnot be disrupted by the death of Christ as man.

And therefore also, the Godhead or divinity was not separated from the human soul of Christ during its hours of the soul’s separation from the sacred body.

Yet it is not correct to say that Christ was man duringthe period of his death; for a man means a living man, and Christ during this space of time was not living but dead. His soul did not then animate the body, for he had truly died. Christ remained really dead from the moment his soul left the body on the cross until the moment it revivified the body for the Resurrection.

The body which hung dead upon the cross was buried inthetomb. This was the same body which had undergone the Passion, and which was to rise glorious and immortal. For the body of Christ, living and dead, was identically the same body. It wasnot, indeed, totally the same, for there is a difference between a body living and the same body dead. But, apart from this difference, the body in the tomb, and the body which suffered the Passion, and the body glorified at Resurrection was the same body.

St. Augustine (De Trin. i v) says that the one death of Christ in the body saved us from two deaths, that is, the death of the body and the death of the soul. We are, of course, to die a bodily death, but now it is not a victory over us: “Death is swallowed up in victory” (I Cor. 15:54). And the death of Christ destroys in us the necessity of dying in sin and being plunged into the endless death of eternal torment.