Video meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor
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Notes on Msgr. Lane's Talk on the Passion of the Lord:
Christians have struggled with the Crucifixion since the very beginning, going back to the account of the men on the road to Emmaus. "What does this mean?". Some early Christian thinkers came up with a legalistic view, that humans errored and it makes sense that only God can appease God. But that's horrible. What kind of God sends His Son to die in order to appease Himself?
Another way to look at it is to recall that we are made in the image and likeness of God which is reflected in human freedom. Freedom is what makes us human and able to relate to God in a one-to-one in a friendship relationship rather than a dependent, destructive way. Look at families where a parent watches every thing the child does and forces obedience - that child is not free and ultimately bears a hatred towards his parents.
God intended Jesus as a gift. He said as it were, "go down and give yourself to them, put yourself in their hands." Gift, not appeasement. It is human nature to be threatened by holiness since we have constructed a world and are comfortable with it as it is.
Read the language describing moment of Christ's death. It is the triumph of chaos. It is the only way the Hebrew writers, who could not use an abstraction, could describe nihilism, nothingness. The darkness descending over the abyss, the wind over it, recalls Genesis before the creation of the world. The world was ending. God was dying in a very real sense, not just the harmless sense in which Jesus was just giving up a body that was a lot of trouble anyway....
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