faithandreason - Christ's Mission was a Failure

Christ's Mission was a Failure

Written by Jeremy Klysz

Tuesday, 19 May 2009 05:27

Christ's Mission was a Failure

...or so some modern theologians will have us believe. Aside from being theologically and philosophically nonsensical, this notion comes from a misunderstanding of just what Christ’s mission was and of the necessity of suffering not only in the Incarnation of Christ, but in our own lives as well.

The Father sent His Son into the world primarily for our salvation, and to draw mankind into the Trinitarian relationship. The Son is God, and yet He took on human nature in order to become the new Adam and sanctify the human race. It would be a gross understatement even to say this was an enormous step downwards. God, who is above all and worthy of all praise, dignity and honour, humiliated Himself to become an outcast in society, who saw Him as a bastard child and a nuisance to society. To say that His mission was a failure because it ended in suffering and death is to misunderstand the nature of the Incarnation itself as a mode of suffering.

His death, as stated in the CCC §599, was “not the result of chance in an unfortunate coincidence of circumstances...” Jesus did not accidentally die at the hands of the Roman soldiers. The Father did not hope for the death of His Son, but knew it would happen and would have to happen. Amongst other things, this is a demonstration of the radical difference between our mode of thinking and God’s. To draw an analogy, if the floor of a library were covered in venomous snakes we would not go in to borrow a book. However, God – knowing that it is somehow vital to the human race that the book be borrowed would go Himself to borrow it, knowing full well that there is more than a good probability that He will be bitten and killed by snakes. This is also a demonstration of how much He loves us: He will not just risk almost certain death, but will willingly go into a world which is rife with hostility towards Him, and will suffer horrendous torture and death – that we might have life.

But was it necessary? Being God, couldn’t He have just snapped His (metaphorical) Fingers? Or better still, couldn’t He have prevented the Fall which caused our separation from Him? There is a certain sense in which He could have. But as the Catechism states in §600, He respects each person’s free response to His grace. True love – Divine Love – does not attempt to limit the object of one’s love. We are given a true freedom to choose to cooperate with God and His plan of salvation. True freedom allows the choice to do evil. If the choice is between the Good and the Good it is not a choice at all. God loves us so much that He allows us to reject Him. Again this is a radical display of God’s true love for humanity, which we are called to imitate.

His suffering was necessary in the plan of salvation, because it showed the ultimate reality of the vast difference between the nature of humanity and the nature of God. Jesus as the most truly innocent victim suffered at the hands of most truly guilty humanity. Because “all moments of time are present in their immediacy to God” (CCC §600) we are just as guilty when we sin against Him as was Adam, as were the Jewish leaders who plotted to murder Him, and as the Roman soldiers who tortured Him and drove nails into His palms and feet. It is in that most truly historical and most truly real moment in which humanity murdered Our Lord and God which shows how horrible the human condition can be – in which God has triumphed over evil. He defused evil once and for all in not allowing evil to conquer Him. In the face of such a horrendous crime, God says “I FORGIVE YOU.” He conquered evil with His love and forgiveness in the most radical way.

It can thus be seen as necessary for Christ to have suffered death under Pontius Pilate – that the stark contrast between humanity and God would be shown in all its miserable glory; the moment in which Christ is raised up as true man and true God. True man in that He took upon Himself the punishment that was due to mankind and true God in that He prayed for and effected our forgiveness at the moment of His death.

Jeremy

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