Paid in full: we might think we're given a life sentence for our sins, but as two religious movies show, Jesus always manages to come through and bail us out.

A TEASTER WE CELEBRATE the central mystery of our Christian faith--that Christ is our Redeemer. But what does it mean to call Christ our Redeemer, and what is the nature of this redemption?

Originally a redeemer was one who purchased a slave's freedom, paying off the debt that kept landless peasants imprisoned in permanent servitude. Thus God redeemed the Hebrews from their Egyptian taskmasters, forcing Pharaoh to loosen the shackles of the Israelites. Still, transforming slaves into free people requires more than just a bill of sale, and God's redemption of the Hebrews also changed their hearts, minds, and habits, teaching them to imitate God's justice and mercy and show compassion for all those still trapped in every form of bondage.

A generation ago most Catholics thought Christ was our Redeemer because he washed away our individual sins, and we saw redemption as a private cleansing of our souls. We felt that redemption most sharply in the confessional, where we entered with a catalogue of personal sins and exited with a clean slate.

But today we know that sin's real power is in the way it wounds and alienates communities, tearing apart homes and societies with injustice and violence, and that redemption is a healing and reconciling love that addresses oppression and binds up divisions. Christ redeems us not by saving us as individuals, but by making us whole as communities living under God's reign.

TWO SMALL RELIGIOUS FILMS RELEASED RECENTLY attempt to wrestle with the mystery of our redemption, one of them exploring the role of the biblical Queen Esther in God's redemption of the Hebrews from foreign enemies, and the other examining the struggles of a fictional young girl to find redemption from her sins and the sin of her community. Neither tale fully unpacks the mystery of God's redeeming love, but each offers a tiny morsel to enrich our Easter banquet.

One Night With the King (FoxFaith, 2006) is a creative retelling of the Book of Esther, in which an exiled Jewish community living in the Persian empire during the reign of Xerxes faces the threat of extermination. Having replaced his father upon the throne, the young Xerxes finds himself pressured by royal officials and warlords to fortify his empire through war and foolishly banishes his queen when she refuses to offer public support for these campaigns. So in a Cinderella-like fashion, the emperor conducts a search for a new queen, and a young Jewish girl named Hadassah is drafted into the pool of contestants hoping to win the emperor's heart (and crown).

Hadassah, advised by her uncle Mordecai to hide her Jewish identity, takes the name Esther and wins the emperor's favor and bed with her beauty and virtue. But one of the royal officials pressing Xerxes to war--Haman the Amelekite--seeks the destruction of Mordecai and all of Persia's Jews and convinces Xerxes to issue an edict calling for this slaughter.

In response Mordecai entreats Esther to approach Xerxes and beg her husband to rescind the order. Surely the emperor's heart will be changed when he sees that this edict threatens his beloved. However Persian law requires the death of anyone approaching the emperor uninvited, and Xerxes has not called for Esther.

Trusting in God, Esther comes defenseless before her husband, reveals Haman's treacherous plot, and begs for mercy for herself and her people.

In the power politics of ancient Persia, the emperor's advisors and officials believed that violence and intrigue were the path of redemption, that the empire and its people could only be saved by warring against the Greeks and scapegoating the Jews. Into this world comes a young girl whose God calls her to save her people through a defenseless and courageous act of nonviolence and truth, and in doing so Esther's tale (at least in this film version) suggests that love, not violence, is redemptive.

THE LAST SIN EATER (FOXFAITH, 2007), BASED ON a novel by Francine Rivers, recounts the story of an early 19th century Appalachian community that has held onto the medieval practice of using a "sin eater" to take away the guilt of the recently deceased. Each time someone in this cluster of Welsh families dies, the designated sin eater--an outcast forbidden any other contact with the rest of the community--is summoned to come and take the dead person's sins into his soul by eating a ritual meal left on the body.

But 12-year-old Cadi Forbes cannot wait so long for the sin eater to take away her sins. Feeling responsible for the accidental death of her younger sister, Cadi pines for forgiveness from her heartbroken mother and relief from the unrelenting guilt devouring her soul. So the tortured Cadi begs the untouchable sin eater to consume her sins, only to discover that this well-meaning outcast cannot set her flee.

What Cadi does discover, however, is that the sin eater is simply a victim of the larger community's unwillingness to face and repent its sinfulness. Banished from this supposedly righteous colony of settlers, the outcast sin eater has been forced to bear the community's unacknowledged guilt for a horrid crime. And so instead of offering the redemption Cadi pines for, the sin eater is but a symptom of the community's unwillingness to acknowledge and repent its sin.

Still, Cadi's example of humble contrition and repentance offers her community a genuine path of redemption. Instead of suppressing or denying her sin, or projecting her guilt onto an innocent scapegoat, Cadi confesses the wrong she has done and places her trust in God's mercy. Encouraged and challenged by this graceful example, the young girl's elders and neighbors acknowledge for the first time their own guilt and repent of their cruel treatment of the banished sin eater, welcoming him back into a community that is now both repentant and reconciled. And so Christ has redeemed this community by making it whole.

By PATRICK MCCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.