GOD'S LOVE FOR HIS SON IN THE MYSTERY OF THE REDEMPTION
Taken from Our Savior and His Love
for Us
by
Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O. P.
"And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to Myself."-----John 12:32
WE HAVE seen what the exact meaning of the dogma
is according to St. Thomas: The love of Christ dying for us on the
Cross
pleased God more than the totality of all men's sins can displease Him.
[IIIa, q. 48, a. 2, 4.]
In order to delve more deeply into this mystery, we must consider how it is the manifestation of the uncreated love of God for His Son and for us.
At first blush it might seem that God the Father appears to be cruel to His Son by striking down an innocent person in place of the guilty. This is what the liberal Protestants hold, in their reaction against the thought of Luther and Calvin. It might also seem that God the Father loves us more than He loves His Son, since He has delivered up His Son for us.
This is not so at all, but is but a very inferior view of the matter. This mystery is incomparably superior to any such contentions.
God Has Wished for His Son the Glory of the Redemption
St. Thomas Aquinas has written these profound words: "God's loving one thing more than another is nothing else than His willing for that thing a greater good: because God's will is the cause of goodness in things; and the reason why some things are better than others, is that God wills for them a greater good. Hence it follows that He loves more the better things. God loves Christ not only more than He loves the whole human race, but more than He loves the entire created universe: because He willed for Him the greater good in giving Him a name that is above all names, so far as He was true God. Nor did anything of His excellence diminish when God delivered Him up to death for the salvation of the human race; rather did He become thereby a glorious conqueror: the government was placed upon His shoulder, according to Isa. 9: 6." [Ia, q. 20, a. 4, c. and ad 1.]
In his treatise on the Incarnation, St. Thomas develops this lofty idea when he inquires: [IIIa, q. 47, a. 3.] Did God the Father Himself deliver up His Son to His passion and death? He answers by explaining St. Paul's words: "He that spared not even His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all." [Rom. 8:32.]
In his explanation St. Thomas says: "In three respects God the Father did deliver up Christ to the Passion. In the first way, because by His eternal will He preordained Christ's Passion for the deliverance of the human race, according to the words of Isaias: 'The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquities of us all;' [Isa. 53:6.] and again: 'The Lord was pleased to bruise Him in infirmity.' [Ibid. 53:10.] Secondly, inasmuch as, by the infusion of charity [so that it might pour out upon us], He inspired Him with the will to suffer for us; hence we read in the same passage: 'He was offered because it was His own will.' [Ibid. 53:7.] [This was in order that He might accomplish His redemptive mission.] Thirdly, by not shielding Him from the Passion, but abandoning Him to His persecutors: thus we read [Matt. 27:46] that Christ while hanging upon the Cross, cried out: 'My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?' [Matt. 27:46.] Because, to wit, He left Him to the power of His persecutors, as Augustine says." [Ep. 140.]
What we must consider here is the love of God
the Father for His Son, even at the moment that He delivered Him up for
us. In this there is a very lofty truth that often passes unnoticed
because
of its
elevation and that must be the object of contemplation
for souls whose vocation is one of atonement.
Despite appearances to the contrary, the Cross
on which Jesus seemed to be vanquished is the trophy of His victory.
Jesus
said: "If I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all things to
Myself."
[John 12:32.] God the Father,
through love of His Son, has from all eternity willed for Him this
painful
triumph, this victory over sin and the spirit of evil. But this far
surpasses
our human ideas, and we can scarcely find here upon earth even a symbol
of this sublime Divine love.
Yet, during wartime when a general must sacrifice a handful of men to save his country, who are those that he chooses? He chooses the bravest and those he loves most. He sends for his best lieutenant and tells him categorically: You must be killed to save our country and our army. He embraces the young man and sends him to his death, a death that is all the more glorious because the peril is greater and because there is no escape from it. The young officer leaves, happy that he has been chosen. His general could not have given him a greater proof of his esteem. He accomplishes his destiny as a soldier . . .
Similarly, what officer is chosen to carry the flag into battle? One of the bravest, for he is the chief target of the enemy and he cannot defend himself. He cannot return blow for blow, because he is holding the flag. [It would be a far too materialistic conception of a soldier to think that he is first of all a man who kills. The real soldier is a man who offers his life to save his country, to defend its homes and its intellectual and moral heritage.]
These examples of human heroism give us a faint glimpse of our Savior's heroism and of His Father's love for Him when He delivered Him up for our salvation.
After sending His prophets, of whom several were
put to death, God sent His only-begotten Son, as the parable of the
wicked
husbandmen tells us. God the Father sent His Son to the glorious Death
of the Cross for the salvation of mankind.
And, as St. Paul says: When Christ came into the world He said, "Behold
I come . . . Sacrifices and oblations and holocausts for sin Thou
wouldest
not
. . . Behold I come to do Thy will, O God." [Heb.
10:5-9.]
Through Love of His Son, God Asked of Him the Most Heroic Love
It is easy to love one's country when such love costs nothing. It is heroic to love it when under fire. It is easy to love God when everything is going our way. It is heroic to love Him when everything goes against us, when friends abandon us, and when Heaven itself seems to be closed to us. Let us now consider what was demanded of our Savior?
Love of the good demands the reparation of evil. The stronger the love, the more it demands. God's love of the good demands the reparation of sin which ravages souls, which turns them away from their final end, and plunges them into the concupiscence of the flesh, and of the eyes, into the pride of life, and ultimately into eternal death.
When God the Father gave us His Son to redeem us, He could have been content with the smallest act of charity by the Word made flesh. For the least of Jesus' acts derived from the Divine personality of the Word an infinite value to satisfy and to merit. But then we would not have understood the abysmal chaos which is sin. Even now we understand it so little, after all the sufferings which our Savior endured for our sakes.
God the Father did not retreat before the prospect of the painful death of His own Son, and He asked His Son to expiate our sins by terrible sufferings, and by enduring these sufferings through love to make reparation for all criminal sensuality. He called upon His Son to show us by His own absolute denudation all the shame of the concupiscence of the eyes and pleasure-seeking egoism, to make us realize through His own humiliations the utter folly of pride, and to blot out by His heroic love the disorder of hatreds which divide persons, families, classes, and peoples.
By thus making the utmost demands of His justice, God was not taking pleasure in punishing. On the contrary, He showed how great is His love of the good and His holy hatred of evil, which is merely the reverse of love. No one can sincerely love the good without hating evil. No one can love truth without hating lies. God cannot love the good with infinite love without hating evil with holy hatred. That is why the exigencies of justice are identified with those of love: "Love is strong as death, jealousy as hard as hell," says the Canticle of Canticles. [Cant. 8:6.]
It is this uncreated love of the good united to holy hatred of evil which required of our Savior the most heroic of all acts and sent Him to the glorious Death of the Cross.
This brings us once again to the very essence of the mystery of the Redemption: God the Father asked of His Son an act of love which would please Him more than the totality of all men's sins can displease Him, an act of redemptive love, of infinite and superabundant value.
This was to be the Consummatum est, the crowning glory of Christ's life, victory over sin and over the spirit of evil. This victory of Good Friday is far superior to the victory of Easter, for the Resurrection or victory over death is merely the sign of Christ's triumph over sin.
Thus it was indeed through love for His Son that God the Father asked Him to die for us. He predestined His Son through love to the glory of the Redemption. What would Jesus' life have been without Calvary? Similarly but on a far humbler level, what would the life of St. Joan of Arc have been without her Martyrdom? And for that matter, what would have been the life of all the others who have been called to shed their blood in testimony of the truth of the Gospel? Without this consummation, their lives would now seem to us merely mutilated. And we can understand without too great difficulty that it was a predestination of love that sent them to their Martyrdom . . .
The depths of the mystery of the Redemption help us to understand why God through love sends such great sufferings to certain souls, to make them labor in union with our Lord, and in a small way like Him, for the salvation of sinners. This is the loftiest of all vocations, superior to the vocation of teaching, just as Jesus was greater on the Cross than when He was preaching the Sermon on the Mount.
What greater proof of His love can God give a soul than to make of it a victim of love, in union with the crucified Savior? As the first cause does not obviate the secondary cause, but communicates to it the dignity of causality, so our Savior's sufferings do not render ours useless but raise them up and make us participate in His life.
Let us call to mind, among many others, the example of St. Catherine de Ricci. From 1542 to 1554, a period of twelve years, she experienced each week an ecstasy of suffering lasting twenty-eight hours, from Thursday at noon until Friday at four in the afternoon, an ecstasy in which she relived every moment of our Savior's Passion. Motionless, her face either pale or radiant, her eyes and arms reaching out toward the Beloved, Who remained invisible to others present, she followed Him step by step and heart to heart, in each of the stations of this long sacrifice. [Cf. the chapter dealing with this ecstasy of the Passion in the excellent Vie de St. Catherine de Ricci by Rev. C. Bayonne.] The witnesses of this fact were aware of the Saint's sufferings because her whole being quivered and trembled during this painful way of the Cross. When these sufferings began again on the following Thursday, nature must have begged for respite, but our Lord gave this great soul to understand that she must thus unite herself to His passion for the salvation of a certain sinner who was dear to Him or the deliverance of a particular Soul in Purgatory. It is in this manner that Jesus initiates the souls He loves most into the depths of the mystery of the Redemption.
One of these beloved souls who had offered herself up and who after her oblation saw everything go against her, so to speak, cried out one day when she had been overwhelmed by a new misfortune: "But Lord, what have I done to Thee?" In answer she heard these interior words: "Thou hast loved Me." She then thought of Calvary and understood with greater clearness that the seed must die in order to bear abundant fruit.
Divine Providence calls forth these extraordinary occurrences not for us to consider with curiosity but to make us understand better the grandeur of Jesus' passion. Indeed we should meditate upon it every day. These occurrences also remind us that, if the Saints have accepted such sufferings in union with our Savior, we in turn should each day learn to accept better life's daily ups and downs in atonement for our sins, for our sanctification, and so that we too may labor in a measure for the salvation of souls. These extraordinary occurrences are meant to help us understand how much depth there is in the ordinary course of a genuinely Christian life, from early morning Mass and Communion throughout the day until night prayers are said at the close of the day.
We should grasp a little better each day the splendors of the liturgy of the Passion, those sublime verses which express lofty contemplation and great love:
Forth comes the Standard of the
King.
All hail, thou Mystery ador'd!
Hail, Cross! on which the Life
Himself Died,
and by death our life restored!
This is the habitual object of contemplation of the Saints.
We can see, therefore, that the demands of justice are ultimately identified with those of love, and mercy wins out because it is the most immediate and deepest expression of God's love toward sinners. [Cf. St. Thomas, Ia, q. 21, a. 4: "Now the work of Divine justice always presupposes the work of mercy; and is founded thereupon. For nothing is due to creatures, except for something pre-existing in them, or foreknown. Again, if this is due to a creature, it must be due on account of something that precedes. And since we cannot go on to infinity, we must come to something that depends only on the goodness of the Divine will-----which is the ultimate end . . . So in every work of God, viewed at its primary source, there appears mercy. In all that follows, the power of mercy remains, and works indeed with even greater force; as the influence of the first cause is more intense than that of second causes."] The terrible justice of God which first holds our attention is but the secondary aspect of the Redemption, the latter being above all a work of love and mercy.
Divine justice has been appeased by the Just One who bore the burden of human sin in its totality, by the Victim of love Who was struck down in our place, by the Word made flesh Who died for us.
But mercy also triumphs: God the Father is reconciled through Jesus with sinners, and restores grace to them. He offers eternal life to all, even to the most perverted, and He glorifies the Redeemer by giving Him victory over sin, over the devil, and over death. It is with this in mind that St. Paul says: "All is yours; and you are Christ's; and Christ is God's." [1 Cor. 3:23.]
This idea has been beautifully rendered by a great painter in the Oratory of the Dominican Superior General at Rome. Above the altar Jesus is represented dying on the Cross and offering His life to His Father for our salvation. The Father appears directly above the Savior, receiving His last sigh. In this painting the artist sought to show the harmony between the wills of the Father and of the Son on Calvary. He desired to bring out the fact that on the Cross our Lord not only accomplished the will of His Father, but also continued to express His love for the Father. Conversely, it was out of love for His Son and for us that the Father sent Jesus to the heroic Death of the Cross, in order to make Him the glorious victor over sin, the devil, and death, the Savior of all men.
<>That is why in this beautiful painting there is only one gesture: the Father has His arms outstretched to sustain and accept the sacrifice of His Son, and it is on His Father's heart and in His arms that our crucified Lord expires: "Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit." [Luke 23:4-6.] The expression of the Father is full of mercy and nobility, the Son's expression manifests the full heroism of His love for the Father and for us. [There is a fine reproduction of this painting in the quarterly review of religious art edited by Dom Gaspar Lefebvre, O.S.B.: L'Artisan liturgique, October-December, 1937., p. 571: "Trois tableaux du Pere M.-A. Couturier, O.P.," and in L'Annee Dominicaine, June, 1933. Note: The image presented here is not this painting.] This is the very essence, so far as it can be expressed in human terms, of the mystery of the Redemption.
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