217 – Atoning Sacrifice

“[It] must be ever remembered, that Christ’s death was not a mere martyrdom. A martyr is one who dies for the Church, who is put to death for preaching and maintaining the truth. Christ, indeed, was put to death for preaching the Gospel; yet He was not a Martyr, but He was much more than a Martyr. Had He been a mere man, He would have been rightly called a Martyr, but as He was not a mere man, so He was not a mere Martyr. Man dies as a Martyr, but the Son of God dies as an Atoning Sacrifice. …There was a virtue in His death, which there could be in no other, for He was God.”1

     Adam and Eve disobeyed God and were thrown out of eternity; their sin gained them the knowledge of mortality, which they have passed down to all of us along with the effects of their original sin. Restitution calls for reparations to be done by a human being, for he committed the sin, but a mere human cannot overcome death and restore us into eternity. It takes the stature of someone who is divine to do that. God so loves us that He sent His only begotten Son to redeem us. Christ, who is eternally divine, was incarnate of the Blessed Virgin Mary and became man, but not a mere man, a man with two natures, divine and human. Thus, only He could die for us in restitution for Adam and Eve’s sin, so that we might become eternal again. But the onus is on us, there are only two eternities, Satan and God’s; we have to choose to be with God. We do this by obeying His commandments, which are not restrictions but ways of showing our love for God and our neighbor. In this Lenten season we have forty days to examine our conscience to prepare us for the ultimate “Atoning Sacrifice” that Jesus Christ made for us, so that at His resurrection when He defeats mortality by rising from the dead and reopens the gates of heaven, we are worthy of the sacrifice he mad for us.

Dennis Higgins (16 April 2019)

1. John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, volume VI, sermon 6 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, reprinted 1997) pp. 1231