CHAPTER 19 - REDEMPTION

I

THE very heart of the doctrine of the Redemption is that the human acts of Christ were the acts of a Person who was divine.
Everything that Christ did and suffered and experienced must be seen as done and suffered and experienced by God.
God was born of a virgin in Bethlehem.
God was a carpenter.
God rejoiced.
God sorrowed.
God suffered.
God died.
It is the last two phrases that force us really to face the mystery and test our realization of it.
If God did not suffer and die, then no one did, for there was but the one person in Christ;
that is there was no suffering, no dying: no sacrifice, no redemption.
The phrase "God died" gives us at first the greater shock, but afterwards is less profoundly mysterious than the phrase "God suffered".
The whole created universe,
with everything in it from archangel down to electron, or any lower thing there may be,
is held in existence from instant to instant solely by the continuing will of God to hold it so.
And the words God died seem to carry annihilation to all things that thus depend upon God.
But it is by the operation of His divine nature that God sustains all things in being,
and it is not in his divine nature that God the Son died,
but only in His human nature, the most glorious of created things,
but a created thing for all that.
Death is a separation of soul and body.
The phrase " God died" means that for that three days' space God's soul was separated from God's body:
it was a real death but it left the divine Nature totally unaffected.

But what are we to make of the phrase God suffered?
Again the suffering was not in the divine nature, but in the human.
Christ's suffering, the fear and agony in the Garden for instance, was real suffering, that is to say someone really suffered it.
And that someone was God the Son.
How this can be, what indeed it means, we cannot fully know, indeed we can hardly feel that we know at all.
The mind seems able to make no statement here.
Yet it is literally true that, even if we cannot say it, there are momentary flashes of light, glimpses and glances, in which we half see it;
and there is no measuring the fruitfulness of even this momentary half-seeing for sanctity;
and not for sanctity only but for plain human consolation.

Summarizing this relation of nature and person in Christ's atoning act,
we see that because He was man with a true human nature He could offer a true human act in expiation of human sin,
an act of total love to balance humanity's self-love;
and because He was God, the human act He offered was of infinite value and so could satisfy and more than satisfy for the sins of men.
But stating it thus, we see another question.
Any act of Christ must be of infinite value since the Person who does the act is God.
Why then does Christ offer His death, when some lesser act would have been of infinite value and therefore totally sufficient?
Might He not have offered His thirst when He sat weary from His journey by Jacob's Well in Samaria?
Or His patience under insult?
Or any one of a thousand other things?
Why did it have to be His death?

In one sense the answer is clear.
He had come into the world to teach the truth—
about Himself as God, for instance,
about Himself as Messias,
about the Kingdom which was to be in the world but not of it,
about the Gentiles who would come into it,
about the failure of the leaders of Israel to grasp the essentials of their own religion.
His execution was the natural consequence.
Only a miraculous intervention of the divine power could have prevented it.
Given that He was to die, it is hard to think of His offering some lesser thing than His death as the sacrifice that should save mankind.

But all things are in the power of God.
God could have inter-vened to prevent His death.
Or He might have chosen a way of life that meant no such direct challenge to the rulers.
Why, we may ask in all reverence, did the divine plan include the death of the Redeemer?

The two answers that instantly spring to mind are that
nothing could show the love of God so overpoweringly as His willingness to die for us,
and nothing could show the horror of sin so clearly as that it needed His death to expiate it.
Now it is true that Calvary is a proof both of the awfulness of sin and of the love of God,
but it would not be so unless there was something in the nature of sin that required Calvary.
If the sin could as well have been expiated by some act of Christ less than His death,
then Calvary would not show the horror of sin but would in fact exaggerate it.

The same line of argument would not so obviously apply to Calvary as a proof of God's love,
yet there would be something profoundly unsatisfying in the notion of God's showing His love for us by a needless death.
A moment's reflection will show that there was something in what Our Lord had to do which made His dying the best way to do it.
It is true that on the side of the Person who made the offering any act in the human nature, however small in itself, would have sufficed.
But on the side of the nature in which the offer was made, can we feel that any act however small would have sufficed?

Obviously no.
The sacrifice was a true act of human virtue offered in reparation for a human act of rejection of God.
It is true that no act of human nature could by itself have sufficed to expiate,
and that it was the divinity of His Person which gave the act of Christ's human nature the efficacy which by itself it could not have had.
But that is no reason for reducing the human element in the sacrifice to a mere token.
For if it were so, we should be left with a sense of an unreal transaction in which God makes an offering to God.
It was human nature's offering, though it took a divine Person to make it.
The God who made the offering was man, too, and it was in His manhood that He made it.
Human nature could not do all:
yet it must do all that it could, leaving the divinity of the Person to supply for the remainder.
In the profoundest sense humanity would want this.
Expiation is something required not only by the nature of God, but by the nature of man.
There is something in man which,
when his intellect is clear and his will right,
longs to make expiation rather than merely have his sin forgiven out of hand.
It belongs to human dignity that a man should want to pay his debt rather than have it written off".
And if he cannot pay the whole of it, as in this supreme instance, he yet wants to pay all that he can.
Had Our Lord's offering been by way of some human act of little cost,
then one would feel that humanity's part in the expiation was barely more than a fiction.
In fact Christ's humanity gave all it had to give, for a man has no more to give than his life.
What divinity gave was only what humanity could not give.

But all this discussion is academic.
To discuss what the Redeemer might have done gives us certain lights upon the problem of our redemption.
But they are as nothing to the light that floods out from what He did do.
He gave all that He had upon Calvary:
martyrs since have died in the strength of His death,
knowing that even humanly speaking He gave more than they.
He died: if He had not, we should not have had the Resurrection.
As we shall see, by baptism we are buried with Him in His death, and rise with Him in His Resurrection.
Only God knows what splendours might have been associated with some other way of Redemption;
but we have seen the splendour of this.
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II

The sacrifice of Christ was totally effective.
It could not be otherwise, given that He Who offered it was God.
But it is important to grasp what it effected.
Whatever it was meant to effect, it did effect.
But what was it?
A little precision here will be extra-ordinarily clarifying later.

At the moment of His death on Calvary Christ Our Lord said

It is consummated.

Something was completed.
But something was beginning, too,
and the something that was beginning was not simply the paradisal enjoyment by men—
either by all men or by an elect or even by Christ Himself—
of what He had achieved by His sacrifice,
but something with vast labour and anguish and the possibility of failure in it for men,
and with work still for Christ to do.
Something was completed.
But, at the right hand of the Father,
Christ Himself continues His work of intercession for us (Heb.vii.25);
and we have seen His last days upon earth filled with the preparation of His Apostles to continue His work among men until the end of time.

The thing that was completed was the Redemption of the race.
The race had sinned in its representative man and as a result was no longer at one with God:
so that Heaven was closed to it;
bound up with the severed relationship of the race with God there was a mysterious subjection to the Devil:
by his victory over Adam the Devil had secured some kind of princedom over Adam's race,
so that he is called the prince of this world.
His princedom carried no legal rights but vast power:
in the decree Firmiter, Pope Eugenius IV says:

no one has ever been liberated from the domination of the Devil save by the merit of the Mediator.

The primary effect of Our Lord's sacrifice was the undoing of Adam's sin.
The princedom of the Devil was destroyed.
And the breach between the race and God was healed,
so that Heaven was opened to the members of the race.
This fundamentally is the Redemption.

Let us consider these two results in turn.

If the Son of God was revealed to us,
says St. John,
it was so that He might undo what the devil had done.
(i John iii.8.)

It is, as we have noted, foreign to our habits of thought to attach any real importance to the Devil,
that strange intervening third in the relations between man and God.
But this is a defect in our mental habits.
It can never be intelligent to take lightly anything that God takes seriously.
And God takes the Devil very seriously indeed.
It will be remembered that when, after the fall of man.
God had foretold Redemption,
He had not only foretold it to the Devil,
but had expressed it in terms of a victory over the Devil:
the seed of the woman was to crush his head.

When the hour of the Redemption came.
Our Lord was intensely preoccupied with this aspect of it as the struggle between Himself and the Devil,
issuing in victory for Himself over the Devil.
Early in Passion Week He cried out:

Now is the judgment of the world:
now shall the Prince of this World be cast out. (Jn..31.)

At the Last Supper He returns to the theme twice:

The Prince of this World comes and in me He has not anything. (Jn.xiv.30);

and again:

The Prince of this World is already judged (Jn.xvi.11).

Why was Our Lord so preoccupied with Satan?
It may be because He was restoring the order of reality against which Satan is the great protest,
so that Satan's power was ranged against Him at the peak of intensity.
What is interesting is that the Devil so little understood the nature of Our Lord's mission, that he rushed upon his own defeat.
For as St. Luke and St. John both tell us,
it was Satan who entered into Judas to cause him to betray Christ into the hands of His enemies,
thus precipitating Christ's redemptive sacrifice.
It is some consolation to us to know that an enemy of intellect so powerful is not always well informed.

But the overthrow of Satan's princedom is only incidental to the healing of the breach between the race and God,
by which Heaven is opened to the race of men.
Let us repeat that this was something done for the race.
John the Baptist had hailed Our Lord:

Behold the Lamb of God,
behold Him Who takes away the sin of the world. (John i.29.)

There was a sin of the world, and Christ died to destroy it.

Now once at the end of ages.
He has appeared for the destruction of sin by the sacrifice of Him-self. (Heb.ix.26.)

As a result, Heaven was once more opened to men.
A man was enthroned there where no man had yet been, a man who had gone there to prepare a place for us.
As the Roman Missal has it, in one of the prayers of Easter Week:

He unlocked for us the gates of eternity.

Thus the sin of the race in the representative man, Adam,
was taken away by the new representative man, Christ.

A man had brought us death
and a man should bring us resurrection from the dead;
just as all have died with Adam,
so with Christ all will be brought to life. (i Cor.xv.21.)

It is magnificent, and the soul rejoices.
Yet the intellect, trying to comprehend, may be faintly troubled.
At first glance there seems something arbitrary and almost capricious in it.
Adam falls, and we are informed that Adam represented us and we have all fallen in him.
Christ atones, and we are informed that Christ represents us and we are all redeemed in Him.
Where, we might wonder, do we really come in?
Who and what are these representatives?
Above all, why?

But there is nothing arbitrary.
Each is our representative because of a real relation of us to him.
We have already seen that this is so of Adam.
There is a solidarity of the human race,
linking us physically to one another,
and to the first man from whom we all come:
and because of it our fate was involved in his.
Christ is entitled to act for us by a double title: first on the side of His divinity.
He is the God by whom and in whose image man was created;
second on the side of His humanity.
He is the perfect man,
so that where Adam was the first man in time,
Christ is the first man in value,
Christ is the moral head of the race as Adam the physical.
Adam represents humanity in that all of us come from him,
Christ in that there is no element of humanity in any of us (Adam included) that is not better and richer and completer in Him.
So that His act in compensation of Adam's is available for all men (Adam again included).
The barrier erected by man's sin between the race and God is down.
There is no longer a sin of the race to stand between us and sonship of God, between us and entry into Heaven.

But our different relationships to Adam and to Christ involve a difference in the way of our sharing in the result of their acts.
We fell in Adam inasmuch as we are united with him:
we are restored in Christ inasmuch as we are united with Him.
Adam's act becomes ours because we are (as we cannot help being) one with him.
Christ's act becomes ours only when we become (as we may unhappily fail to become) one with Him.
We are incorporated with Adam by the mere fact of being born;
for incorporation with Christ, we must be reborn.

The man who came first came from earth,
fashioned of dust,
the man who came after-wards came from heaven,
and his fashion is heavenly.
The nature of that earth-born man is shared by his earthly sons,
the nature of the heaven-born man by his heavenly sons;
and it remains for us, who once bore the stamp of earth,
to bear the stamp of heaven. (i Cor.xv.47.)

We fell as members of humanity stemming from Adam;
we are restored as members of a new humanity stemming from Christ.

We may now look again at what was completed by Our Lord's sacrifice on Calvary.
Satisfaction was made, complete satisfaction, for the sin of the human race:
the breach between God and the race was healed.
That work was done,
done completely,
done once for all,
because Christ had offered complete satisfaction for the sin of the race.
He had not only satisfied, but more than satisfied:
He had merited for men restoration to the sonship of God,
the supernatural life in which that sonship consists,
the life by which we can look upon the face of God in Heaven.
Heaven was once more open to men.
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III

But the opening of Heaven does not mean that every man will get there.
Some will fail:
the defeat of Satan in his effort to hold the race does not mean that he will have no more victories over individuals.
In other words the Salvation of the individual does not follow automatically upon the Redemption of the race.
It is a further problem, involving a further warfare.
In plain words, though no man enters Heaven save because Christ offered the atoning sacrifice,
no man enters Heaven simply because Christ offered the atoning sacrifice.
His sacrifice availed both for the Redemption of the race—
satisfying for sin and meriting restoration —
and for the Salvation of the individual, but in different ways:
it effected the Redemption of the race, it made possible the Salvation of the individual.

The distinction here made between the terms Redemption and Salvation must not, of course, be taken too absolutely.
Obviously, there can be no hard and fast allocation of the word Redemption to what Our Lord did for the race and Salvation to what He does to the individual;
He was the saviour of the race as well as of the individual;
by redeeming the race.
He redeemed the individual.
Yet I think there is a tendency in Scripture to use the words more often in the way here suggested.

However this may be,
let us repeat that the sacrifice on Calvary was a propitiation
not only for the representative sin of the race,
but for the personal sins of all members of the race:

He is the propitiation for our sins,
and not for ours only but also for those of the whole world. (i Jn. ii. 2.)
He has washed us from our sins in His own blood. (Apoc.i.5.)

But whereas the Redemption of the race was entirely His work and therefore wholly achieved,
the Salvation of the individual depends upon our co-operation with His work and some of us may fail.
This is the reason for a variation of phrasing in Scripture—
Christ being said at one time to have died for all and at another time to have died for some—
which at first seems puzzling.
The first phrase means that He excluded none from the reach of the sacrifice,
the second that some have excluded themselves and so are not reached by it.

Being consummated He became, to all that obey Him, the cause of eternal salvation. (Heb.v.9.)

But nothing must dim our realization of the truth that He died for all without exception:

Such prayer is our duty,
it is what God our Saviour expects of us,
since it is His will that all men should be saved
and be led to recognize the truth:
there is only one God,
and only one Mediator between God and men,
Jesus Christ, who is a man, like them,
and gave Himself as a ransom for them all.
(i Tim.ii.3.)

Christ died for all.

But though He died for all, yet not all receive the benefit of His death,
but those only unto whom the merit of His passion is communicated.
(Council of Trent vi. §2.)

Salvation depends upon our receiving the supernatural life by which we become sons of God and having this life in our souls when we die.
Christ merited it for all men.
But, as we have already seen,
we do not receive it automatically merely by being born (for by birth we are one with Adam in whom we fell),
but by being re-born in Christ, made one with Him in such a way that in Him we are restored.
If we do not receive the life, or if we receive it but lose it and die without it, then we shall not be saved.

Notice particularly how St. Paul emphasized the distinction between Christ's death on Calvary and our salvation by it.

God means us to win salvation through Our Lord Jesus Christ,
Who has died for our sakes,
that we, waking or sleeping may find life with Him. (i Thess.v.10.)

In the Epistle to the Romans he makes equally clear not only that there is something to be done by us for our salvation, but that Christ's own part in our salvation is not confined to His death on Calvary:

For if, when we were enemies,
we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son,
much more, being reconciled shall we be saved by His life. (v.10.)

Christ dying made our salvation possible, Christ living still operates to make it actual.

How?
Christ works for us in Heaven in His own Person, upon earth through His Church.
Here let us consider for a moment Christ in Heaven.
We have seen that He is at the right hand of the Father in the whole of His reality, body and soul and divinity.
We have also seen that He continues to make intercession for us:

Jesus continues forever, and His priestly office is unchanging;
that is why He can give eternal salvation to those who through Him make their way to God,
He lives on still to make intercession on our behalf. (Heb. vii. 25.)

As St. Thomas says (S.T. iii q. 54):

interceding for us.
He ever shows the Father what kind of death He bore for man.

In other words Christ Our Lord is ever in the presence of His Father in that sacred humanity which He offered once for all upon Calvary:
and by that continuing presence before God of that which was offered for us, our own continuance in the way of salvation is made possible.

He sits now at the right hand of God, annihilating death,
to make us heirs of eternal life. (i Peter iii.22).

We shall have occasion to return to this continuing priesthood of Christ in Heaven.
For the moment we must turn to a study of the Church which is the continuation of His work upon earth,
which is in fact Himself continuing to work upon earth.
As we proceed in this study of the Church,
we shall come to a fuller understanding than we have even yet indicated of what is meant by oneness with Christ,
and with that to the deepest meaning of Christ's redemptive work.
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