Into the realm of unknown joy we shall all find one day
When is Suffering not Enough?
The question regarding Jesus’ street punishment and the very ignominy he endured throughout his ministry should have been enough; or was it?
We are told that one drop of Blood would be more than sufficient for our redemption! Is that true or has someone decided that as long as the Lord suffered just a tiny bit then ours could follow the same route?
Perhaps we need to look a little deeper into the reason Christ suffered as he did, without adding scenarios of our own choosing. How did the thought of the Incarnation originate with God? We can assume it began with the decision of the Holy Trinity to make man and his destiny from the words; “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” (Gn 1: 26). Here the truth is that the three persons of the Trinity were always together and none of them spoke individually without the agreement of all three persons collectively. God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female. (Gn 1: 27).
The Trinity is One. We do not confess three Gods, but one God in three persons, the consubstantial Trinity. The divine persons do not share the one divinity among themselves but each of them is God whole and entire. “The Father is that which the Son is, the Son that which the Father is, the Father and the Son that which the Holy Spirit is, i.e, by nature one God. (CCC 253).
So when the Holy Trinity spoke of human creation he spoke collectively and in total agreement among themselves. When the next crisis that man would encounter was the influx of sin into the wonderful world that humanity would inherit, a decision needed to be made of how would God deal with this evil because it was going to be the one stumbling block that would deny man’s destiny to be with God for all eternity?
Since sin was a rejection of the divine, it would be the one entity that could never be erased by man. Sin against the divine would need a divine person to make amends with God. God needed another divine person to pay the ransom that the sin of man created, a necessity that now required a being far above man’s finiteness.
Since the Holy Trinity was the only divinity in eternity, the only one to pay the ransom would be God himself. Since the abstraction of man’s sinfulness could not be healed by himself, God would become one among these creatures to live and understand through the eyes of humanity what the nature of sin is and how it could destroy the finite mind of man.
Through the miracle of the Incarnation, God would assume humanity and become two natures in one person; living among men who he came to forgive, suffering for their sins, and clearing a path for man to be led back home with God.
Sin is an environmental attachment to man’s surroundings and it can never go away by just believing it will. Once it became part of our companionship we needed more than faith; we needed the presence of Christ who died to destroy its evil tendencies on man.
Because sin was so evil and needed to be destroyed for all eternity, Christ had to become the very nature of sin itself and on the Cross it was the sin of humanity that had to be destroyed. Christ’ dying was the permanent destruction of sin forever. His words before dying were; “It is Finished!” The total rejection of man against God was the book of evil now being put to rest in the flames of Hell. Did he have to suffer as he did? Absolutely! Without the total destruction of sin through Christs’ suffering and death, we would not have been redeemed. The only manner to wipe sin away from man’s weaknesses Christ proved that suffering is a necessary entity that will only begin to be the example of our own suffering to simulate the Love of God by his total Mercy for all of us.
Ralph B. Hathaway