Jesus Our...

For this Second Friday of Easter I present as a reminder some of the aspects of the work of Jesus on the Cross. Alleuia He is Risen!

Jesus Our…

Jesus is everything to us, He followed the will of the Father and led us to Him. We are in Him and He in Us. We cannot live without Him. His atoning sacrifice is what Easter is all about and is thus the greatest of all feasts and greatest of all days for Christians everywhere. This is a gift from God.

Below I have presented some aspects of the Cross and what they mean for all of us. I cannot pretend this was easy - in fact I found it overwhelming to try and write. The Gospel is so important that anyone trying to present it must try and be as accurate and clear as possible - this is my attempt but should just be seen as a jumping off point for your own prayerful study into the greatest of all deeds.

Eric

Jesus Our Satisfaction

At the heart of the gospel is the Atonement - which means ‘At One’. It is what St Paul described in 2 Corinthians; God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself¹. The fullness of God within Christ whose blood that spilled on the Cross brought us peace and reconciliation with the Father ². As St John wrote:

In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. ³

The Catechism says:

By his obedience unto death, Jesus accomplished the substitution of the suffering Servant, who “makes himself an offering for sin,” when “he bore the sin of many,” and who “shall make many to be accounted righteous,” for “he shall bear their iniquities.” Jesus atoned for our faults and made satisfaction for our sins to the Father (615, emphasis original).

Jesus is our satisfaction because a debt had to be paid to God for our sins - both Original Sin and our daily sins. This debt was far greater than anything we ourselves could pay so Christ came to save sinners⁴- that is all of us, from the day we are conceived we are Sinners through the line of Adam but when Jesus died on the Cross He made a way for us to become new creations⁵ - literally the old power of Sin has been broken in us when we have have faith in Jesus Christ. What makes this possible is the mystery of the incarnation - only God could save us but only in human flesh.

This is the GOOD NEWS! We are no longer condemned because Christ took on our Sin for us - as Romans 8:1 said; There is therefore now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. Please let that sink in! You who are baptised, you are in Christ and His grace covers your sin. So when we feel down, and shamed and think God could not love us - there is now no condemnation! This of course does not negate our daily sins and their effects but now we are in the line of Christ, who took on our flesh so we could become divinized enabling us to live holy and sanctified lives. Instead of being far from God, we have been brought close.

Jesus Our Justification

According to the Council of Trent justification is:

a translation from that state in which man is born a child of the first Adam, to the state of grace and of the adoption of the sons of God through the second Adam, Jesus Christ, our Saviour.

As stated above we were as a race cut off from God through the Sin of our first parents, suffering what theologians call Original Sin. God is so Other, so Holy, a sinful race in chains to evil and death could not possibly reach God, neither reason or pleading lays a path for us to Him. This is why we need to the grace of Justification. God merited through Christs work on the Cross our reconcilliation to Him - an adoption as Sons and Daughters. We cannot begin to think about faith unless it is first enabled by God. This is why when people say ‘they found God’, it is completely wrong. God found us. What is even more amazing is that this grace of God is freely open to all. ‘For Christ came to save the many’. Whatever we have done, God can justify. But Justification goes further, justification also makes us holy.

The intial Justification that comes by Baptism becomes then the renewal of the interior person through the work of the Holy Spirit. The Righteousness of God is poured into us ‘ontologically’ making us righteous. This means that the whole person working in cooperation with the Spirit becomes more and more righteous.

But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. ⁶

All of this is an act of the Grace of God which is the free and undeserved help from God. Grace enables all of this, it is active in Baptism, active when we come to faith, active in helping us cooperate with God in holiness, active when we do works of charity that continue to sanctify us. The love of God is forever drawing us, forever waiting for us to come close to Him. He has turned His face to Us, lets turn ours to Him.

Of course this isnt the end of the story:

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life. ⁷

Here St Paul affirms his teaching on Salvation being a gift from God but then continues that we have works to do, prepared for us - we are to walk as Christ walked to love as God loves⁸ . As St Paul wrote we are to present our members (ourselves) as slaves to righteousness, in obedience to Jesus, taking up His cross, putting aside gossip and slander, hate and bitterness and putting on love. For we are called to love our brothers and sisters and if we do not we not, we do not know God⁹. These works can merit for us the graces of sanctification because it is not just enough to say we have faith.

St James wrote that faith without works is dead¹⁰ - he challenges us in fact with a comparison to Abraham, for yes he was justified by faith but he was obedient to the call of God. He moved from his homeland of Ur to Canaan. He took his son up the mountain to be sacrificed. Abraham was obedient and so we are called to be obedient even onto the Cross. Faith and works require each other and yet all of this is still a grace of God. St Peter in his Second Letter (1:3 -11) also took this theme up stating:

His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may become participants in the divine nature. For this very reason, you must make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love.

For if these things are yours and are increasing among you, they keep you from being ineffective and unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For anyone who lacks these things is short-sighted and blind, and is forgetful of the cleansing of past sins. Therefore, brothers and sisters, be all the more eager to confirm your call and election, for if you do this, you will never stumble. For in this way, entry into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ will be richly provided for you.

Jesus Our Redeemer

The central idea behind Redemption is ransom - a ransom paid to satisfy a debt. The debt has been accrued by us and it is God that we owe. But Jesus said He came to be a ransom for many ¹¹. The classic text is Isaiah 53

Surely he took up our pain
    and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
    stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
    each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
    the iniquity of us all.

Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
    and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
    and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.

Redemption has two aspects to it: for God, His wrath is appeased and honour repaired and for Man it is the translation from darkness into light - from the slavery of sin and death to the adoption as sons and daughter of God. Jesus did the will of the Father in becoming a ransom for us, He was the suffering servant sent as the Passover Lamb. His body and blood redeems our own, and when He died, we follow Him in Baptism which brings the remission of Sins and a new life.

He bore our sins and suffering meaning that when we suffer on earth due to sin we lift it to God and He acts as our advocate in heaven. But more than this, when we suffer from the sins of others or from a fallen world we can unite ourselves with Him and through Him gather the strength neccessary to overcome.¹²

…for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith.  Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? (1 John 5:4-5)

The redemption He offers is greater than anything the world can offer because He came ‘into’ the world, existed before it, who through Him was created and upheld. Self-help can be good, doctors and medications are all helpful and blessings but our real deliverance comes from Christ.

Jesus Our Victor

Jesus was victorious over death and the devil¹³. St Paul writing about the faith said that if there was no resurrections, there is no Christianity. We do not worship someone who is dead, but one who came back to life. For death could not hold him, freed by God and at the head of us captives who were slaves to the devil, to death and the fear of death - led us to resurrection. For in His resurrection we also follow - we were made alive in Christ, we rise with Him. We do not have to fear death anymore, or live each day in anxiety over what we are to eat and drink, but in faith. He was also the victor over the devil, who is chief liar and tries to lead us astray. His victory also means that we in Christ and by His power can deny the devil any power over us, whether in temptations or even in more direct powers. The devil is real and wants to lead us away from Jesus but lets stay close to Him and to the Church He has built.

Jesus Our Lord

One of my life verses in found in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 and it is … you are not your own you were bought with a price. Once we become full members of this catholic family we are all one body in Christ with Him at our head. He is the Lord, the Messiah, the one who will judge the living and the dead. He is due all of our worship and praise - we are not our own any longer to decide what we will, all of our choices and desires need to go through Jesus. So many of us live with Jesus our buddy, Jesus our after-thought, Jesus the guy in the sky with little to do with my life or even Jesus our terror. But Jesus came to bring us life and life abundantly and to really have that we must fully engage with Him and bring our thought life and actions under His hand. We need not fear Him for He tells us: My yoke is easy, my burden is light¹⁴.

The Cross opened the doorway into the heavenly Kingdom, it is now for us to decide to walk through it.

1. 2 Corinthians 5:19

2. Colossians 1:19-20

3. 1 John 4:10

4. 1 Timothy 1:15

5. 2 Corinthians 5:17

6. Romans 6:22

7. Ephesians 2:8-9

8. 1 John 2:6

9. 1 John 4:8

10. James 2:17

11. Mathew 20:28

12. John 16:33

13. Hebrews 2:14-17 & Ephesians 2:4-5

14. Mathew 11:30