Abandon from God: Pasch as a response to evil, not a Payment due

In the Paschal mystery we come face to face with the hypostatic union within the nature’s of Christ, and are left to deal with the stark ramifications of such a union.  It is mind boggling and hard to reconcile the two natures and the many roles one or the other fulfilled in the Sacrifice of the Cross; and yet it is in this Sacrifice that all of mankind was redeemed and this incident around which all of history revolves.  God is encountered through this event as just Judge but Merciful Father, Priest and Victim, willing offering and innocent sufferer.  The Paschal mystery, specifically in the personage of Christ, reveals both the love of God and His mercy by the duality of Christ’s nature as partaker in the Sacrifice and the offering: for in this man sees God as Father unwilling to either command His children to suffer or to leave them in their suffering.  

Knowing that God is at all times both all-Just and all-Merciful, we at once see the Sacrifice of the Paschal mystery as revealing the reconciliation of these two attributes: God who through justice must receive a recompense too great for man to pay and must inflict punishment on man too great for man to bear takes on the form of man Himself so that at once He might save man from punishment and from the debt that man owes to God.  Through His death on the cross “we are cleansed from sin… who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God.  The blood of Christ, shed on the cross, accomplishes what the Jews sought in vain to accomplish through the blood of bulls and goats (Crucified For Our Sake, page 179)”.  Through the hypostatic union of Christ’s two natures, man is simultaneously redeemed from and reconciled to his debt.

The Mercy of God is shown forth by the way in which He allows man to be free from his debt through the divinity and mortality of Christ; but it is through the simultaneous Priesthood and Victimhood of Christ that we see the Love of God most clearly shown.  In His refusal to treat His Son with anger or to pile on the entire guilt of man as if Jesus Himself was guilty, God shows that even in reference to Himself He does not abandon His children, Divine or human.  Rather than either simply commanding Christ die in our place or sufficing that Christ should just take all sins as if a substitute for man, God the Father “inspired Christ with the will to suffer for us (p. 181)”, which He did so lovingly and freely.  Jesus was not left to be the recipient of the tortures of the cross but took sin upon Himself, offering Himself up for the sins of man.  In this, we see that the “sacrifice [of the cross] consisted not in the infliction of a painful death but on the contrary, in violence lovingly and obediently endured in homage to God (p. 187)”.  

God in His love did not abandon any man to suffer the painful retribution owed in the face of Original Sin.  Though He did will and command that Christ suffer, He reversed the typically understood progression of sacrifice and justice so that “The movement of redemption does not go from sinful humanity to a vengeful God, but from a merciful God to His needy creatures (p. 185)”.  Christ as Priest offered Himself out of love for man; as Victim He suffered death in an act of worship and humble obedience to the Father.  In this it is manifest that in the Sacrifice of the Cross, “the gift offered, the sacred humanity of Our Lord, was most perfect, because the offerer, the God-man, was most perfect, and because the offering was made with the most perfect love (page 180)”.