Transcription
Saint Thomas's discussion of Christ's life culminates in a sublime interpretation of the Paschal Mystery—Christ's Passion, death, resurrection, ascension to kingship, and glorious sitting at the right hand of the Father. We must remember that, in Aquinas's view, all of Christ's actions and sufferings throughout His life were salvific acts. And in these final events, we find salvation presented in a powerful and concentrated form. Christ's work gradually ascends to its peak. Aquinas argues that in Christ's Passion and Resurrection, we can find two levels of mediation, referred to as the "upward" and the "downward."
The upward mediation is through Christ's action as a human, interceding or pleading on our behalf before the Father. For example, Christ prays for us, pleading with the Father as one of us humans. Here, we recall Christ's prayer on the cross, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." The downward mediation is Christ acting as God incarnate. Through His humanity as the instrument, He bestows divine graces upon humanity. For example, Christ as God grants grace to the world, with His human actions serving as the medium. This is true even in His Passion (as such). As He promised the thief on the right, "Today you will be with me in paradise."
In the discussion of the work of redemption, it is necessary to explain these two aspects. When he turns to consider Christ's Passion, Aquinas first argues that, for Christ, suffering was not necessary to save us from sin. But what He did was fitting. God could have saved the world in other ways, and He chose to redeem us through Christ's Passion for a reason. The most fundamental reason is that Christ's Passion has an educational significance for us. We thereby understand the depth of human sin and the intensity of God's holy love.
The depth of sin is demonstrated by these facts: God chose to dwell among us and to suffer death at human hands to reveal the gravity of human sin. The intensity of God's holy love is demonstrated by the gratuitousness of this decision. God was not obliged to suffer such intense pain to redeem us, yet He fittingly did so to show us His profound love for the world.
Christ's suffering was exceptionally severe. As Aquinas points out, before the death penalty, there was torture and humiliation, which was the manner of His execution. And the manner of death He endured was to pierce the most sensitive parts of His body, causing Him continuous, intense pain. He witnessed the abandonment of His friends, the rejection of His people, the condemnation by the authorities, and the violence of His enemies. He endured all of this both physically and spiritually.
Especially, He experienced an intimate knowledge of the abyss of human sin and confronted this reality with profound charity and the resulting heartfelt sorrow or contrition. No human has ever known such sorrow. Simultaneously, Christ on the cross, in His human soul, through His knowledge from the Father, knew that through His suffering, God's life was being victorious. And through firm hope, He would finally be comforted by His resurrection in the flesh.
How does God's suffering in humanity save the world? Jesus did not desire the sins for which He was tortured or executed. The fact is that He submitted to these things, which thoroughly demonstrated the failure of human ethics and, in a sense, exposed the sinful nature of humanity itself. However, Christ suffered voluntarily so that He might submit Himself to the totality of human sin to manifest His love for all humanity and thereby earn merit, completing our salvation.
Aquinas argues that Christ's charity is the core of His meritorious action. When He accepted the cross out of obedience to the Father and for our sake, He did so out of love. Even His suffering and obedience unto death on the cross were out of love. Through these, He offered to God a just human love, and this love is priceless. Christ's self-offering is different from all other sacrifices because He is not only human but also God, and therefore His human actions have supreme dignity.
Atonement is reconciliation, or rather, making amends, literally meaning to reconcile God and man through compensation. As an innocent human, with His divine infinite majesty, Christ could accomplish this through His merits, through and in the suffering He endured out of love.
What are the effects of the Passion? Through Christ's merits, we are freed from sin, from the power of evil and the devil, from the punishment we would deserve for our own sins, reconciled with God, and granted the opportunity to attain eternal life. Of course, none of this happens automatically without our participation. We must cooperate with Christ's grace to receive these benefits. However, Christ in His glory can effectively communicate these graces to us, not only as God but also as man, through the downward mediation, as we have already mentioned.
How should we understand Christ's Resurrection? Saint Thomas gives several reasons to explain the necessity of Christ's Resurrection. First, to glorify God's justice, His love and obedience are exalted, and His innocence is proven. Second, to teach us in faith, confirming our belief in His divinity, the mystery of the Resurrection reveals Him as the eternal Son of God. Third, to inspire our hope, so that we may desire Him, recognizing Him as the first fruits of the resurrection, the cause of our own resurrection. Finally, the mystery of the Resurrection, by directing us toward a new life, helps us to order our lives properly, effectively propelling us toward true beatitude.
Christ's human body and soul are glorified together in the Resurrection. In His soul, the beatitude of His human intellect and spirit overflows to all His sensory faculties, generative powers, and through these powers, to His body. We can say that Christ's entire human subject is glorified, or bathed in the radiance of the resurrection grace. In His body, Christ's flesh and blood are transformed from the deepest level, preserved while also elevated to a higher state—spiritualized.
The resurrected Christ enjoys the divine privilege of impassibility, meaning He will no longer suffer, and God's power protects His body from eternal decay. "His body is spiritual and swift," Aquinas says, meaning this body is more perfectly suited to the ultimate end of spiritual life. For example, His body now perfectly obeys His soul. Likewise, Christ in His glorified state can appear to people at will, as He appeared to the apostles. His body also possesses radiance or divine light, by which He can illuminate others into His glory, as He appeared to Saul of Tarsus.
In all of this, Christ's humanity is eternally exalted, as He reigns throughout history and becomes the first source of the new creation.
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