The violence of the cross: a mystery, not a punishment.

On the evening of March 8, 1877, Fr. Augustus Langcake, SJ, was preaching the women's mission in the church of St. Francis Xavier in lower Manhattan. The theme for the evening was "Hell and the Horrors of the Damned." As he vividly described the torments of Purgatory, a woman in the west gallery fainted. In the commotion that formed around her, someone shouted "Fire!" and the women and children in the gallery panicked and rushed for the corkscrew stairs that would take them down to the exit. A stout woman fell and blocked the way; other women fell on top of her, and in the crush seven people died.

Langcake preached at their funeral. He consoled the congregation with the thought that the people had died well-prepared. According to The Catholic Churches of New York City, he asked them not to think that the tragedy was "a proof of God's unkindness," quite the contrary, he said: "God loves victims, requires victims. It is his way. Did he not make his divine Son Jesus Christ a victim? And no one was more pleasing to God the Father than Jesus, his Son; and yet he was the great victim." The Blessed Virgin was another victim, he went on, pierced by "the seven-edged sword of sorrow," and so were the martyrs who "poured out their blood for the faith." "What does this prove?" he asked the people. "It proves that God loves victims; that he wants victims in order to appease his anger against a guilty and fallen race. He chose his victims, but chose them kindly and mercifully. He chose them in his goodness from those that were well prepared in a good moment."

How comforted his people were by Langcake's words we cannot know, of course; it could very well be that they were not unfamiliar with a God as harsh as the conditions of their existence in the world of nineteenth-century immigrant Irish. The theological position on which the priest relied is known as the theory of penal substitution: Christ stepped into our place and endured the full wrath of God's vindictive justice, even the pains of hell, in order to pay off the immense debt incurred by the sins of humanity. It is a doctrine with next to no basis in the New Testament, in the Fathers of the Church, or even among great theologians such as Anselm and Aquinas, whose theories of satisfaction it distorts. It seems to have arisen with John Calvin and today is perhaps most common among Evangelical Protestants [see Christopher Ruddy, page 38]. The great reserve that Catholic theologians always showed toward this doctrine was not imitated by Catholic orators and preachers of the post-Tridentine period, many of whom pulled out all the stops in order to portray the punishment God's wrath inflicted on Christ, the agonies he suffered, the depths of his sense of abandonment. Langcake had many predecessors, and, it would appear, many successors since several participants in a recent Commonweal Web discussion say this is what they learned from their Catholic education. It may also be that the theory inspired the excesses of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ; certainly it explains a great number of the commentaries that praised the film. In contemporary theology, elements of the theory seem to survive in Hans Urs von Balthasar's imaginings about Christ's descent into Hell, an event given only meager mention in the New Testament.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that the doctrine of penal substitution has kept many people away from Christianity and has led others to abandon it. A controversy is now taking place among Evangelicals because one of their theologians, Steve Chalke, has called the theory "cosmic child abuse." In reaction against such violence, it has been and remains tempting to resort to one or another of the forms of Christianity which H. Richard Niebuhr satirized as holding that "a God without wrath brought man without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." For those for whom the terms of that sentence are well nigh incomprehensible, English biblical scholar T. W. Manson's spoof may strike closer to home: "Jesus goes up to Jerusalem to give a course of lecture-sermons on the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, and then becomes the victim of an unfortunate miscarriage of justice." Substitute one or another therapeutic banality ("I'm O.K., you're O.K."? "Follow your bliss"?) for the subject of the talks, and Manson's jibe still tells.

The problem, of course, is what to make of the shameful, horrific way in which the life of Jesus of Nazareth came to an end. It is not a new problem. When two disciples were walking away from Jerusalem, they told the stranger they met on the way that their hopes that Jesus was the one who would redeem Israel had been shattered by his execution; nothing they knew permitted them to associate the Messiah with this disgraceful fate. The stranger rebuked their slowness to understand--"Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and so to enter into his glory?"--and he proceeded to show them from Moses and the other prophets how this was according to a divine purpose. What Jesus did on the road to Emmaus, the early church had to do in order to be able to understand, on the basis of the Scriptures, how both death and resurrection were part of God's plan of messianic salvation. The Passion narratives, the Epistles of St. Paul, and the early speeches in the Acts of the Apostles are filled with the biblical texts in which the early church found the great events anticipated. Jesus was the Suffering Servant of whom Isaiah had spoken, the psalmist whose cry of abandonment ends with an assurance of vindication; he is the stone which the builders rejected but which God has picked up from the trash-heap of history and made the cornerstone in the building he would make of humanity.

From these and other Scriptures the early Christians concluded that all of it, including the Messiah's suffering and death, was according to God's "set purpose and foreknowledge" (Acts 2:23). At a very early stage, within a decade, the death of Jesus was being given a theological interpretation, the one expressed in the creedal formula taught to Paul: "I handed on to you what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures" (1 Cor 15:3-4). The creed recalls a fact, that Christ died, but also an interpretation of that fact, that it was "for our sins," and that this had been foretold in the Scriptures. The association between Christ's death and the forgiveness of sins is stressed and elaborated in a host of passages from almost every New Testament tradition, Synoptic, Johannine, Pauline, post-Pauline, Apocalyptic: he died for the sake of us sinners and on account of our sins. Different notions and images were invoked: Christ redeemed us, bought us, paid for us the price of his life, of his blood; his death was a covenantal sacrifice of which he was both priest and victim; his obedience merited his own glorification and our justification. Sharing in his death and Resurrection defined the inner meaning of Christian baptism: we were baptized into his death and rose for a new life. His willingness to absorb evil by his love and forgiveness gives the pattern Christians are to follow.

What one will not find in the New Testament is any indication that God acted toward Christ or toward us out of vindictive anger. The whole of the work of redemption begins with God's love: "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son" (Jn 3:16). "The proof of God's love for us is that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom 5:6). "God, who is rich in mercy, by reason of his very great love with which he has loved us, even when we were dead because of our sins, brought us to life together with Christ" (Eph 2-5). "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself" (2 Cor 5:19). If Paul had much to say about the wrath of God, it was directed toward the ungodliness and wickedness of both Greeks and Jews (Rom 1:18-3:20), it is not God's wrath that is displayed in Christ's expiatory, cleansing work, but his justice, righteousness, uprightness, what was manifest in his forgiveness of sins, the righteousness by which he makes all, Jews and Greeks, righteous themselves (Rom 3:21-26). Here redemptive justice means the forgiveness of sins.

But even if all this is true, if the whole drama begins and ends out of divine love, do there not remain all those texts in which the suffering and death of Christ are said to be part of God's plan? This is the cup from which Jesus prayed to be delivered, and the will to which he surrendered himself (Mk 14:32-36). Laying down his life was a charge received from his Father (Jn 10:18); the cross was the extreme of the obedience which merited his glorification (Ph 2:5-11). So if Judas gave him over, and some other Jews also, and if he himself gave himself up for us, it is also true that the Father "did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all" (Rom 8:32). "The one who was without sin God made to be sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor 5:21). "He sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and he condemned sin in the flesh" (Rom 8:3).

The problem with the theory of penal substitution is not that it took these and other texts seriously, but that it tried to reduce the complex New Testament presentation of Jesus' death and Resurrection to a single, easily intelligible scheme. This fault was already present in St. Anselm who wanted to go beyond the "picture thinking" with which the Fathers of the Church and the monastic theologians had been content when they meditated on the redemption; Anselm wanted "necessary reasons," an argument that could demonstrate the necessity of the Incarnation and atoning death of Christ. The deformation of his view that is found in the idea of penal substitution follows a similar rigorous logic. A view of justice is brought to bear that is thought to bind even God: the repair of the disturbed order of the universe and of relations between humanity and God can only be brought about by the administration of the strictest requirements of retributive or vindictive justice. It is all very neat, and in its neatness it resembles nothing more than the world of the older son in the parable of the prodigal son who finds his father's free forgiveness incomprehensible, a violation of justice.

This is to neglect that the redemption involves mystery from the beginning to the end. It deals with things like evil and death, life and forgiveness. Any theory will have to move between the supreme mystery of God, whose ways and thoughts are not ours, and the abysmal mystery of evil, not simply the physical evils of earthquakes, tsunamis, and the like, but also the evils that we commit and that are committed against us. Why God created a world in which human beings do terrible things we do not know. Why God permits these terrible things to bear their fruit of death--physical, moral, spiritual, communal--we do not know. Yet that is the world we live in, and it was into that world that Jesus of Nazareth came, and it was that world of sin he encountered and that burden of death that he bore. But the evil and the malice ended with him: "When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but he trusted him who judges justly" (1 Pet 2:23). The reign of sin and death was absorbed by his love and forgiveness, and a frightful evil was transformed into a transcendent good, an execution became a self-sacrifice.

This is what Bernard Lonergan called "the law of the cross," and in it he found the intrinsic intelligibility of the redemption. It was not something necessary, something that had to follow from the nature of God or the nature of sin. But it is something that we can try to understand in its contingent meaning: that God in his wisdom and goodness chose not to free humanity from evil by some great act of power; he chose rather that Christ encounter that evil and transform it by his love into the great good that is the salvation of the human race. It certainly was not God's will that Christ be unjustly tried, convicted, punished, and executed--all of this is the evil of sin. But Christ understood that fidelity to his God-given mission required him to suffer this evil rather than to try to escape it or to respond in kind, and the fidelity, love, and courage that enabled him to endure it are the great gift that God inspired and enabled in him, the full price he himself was willing to pay because of sin and for the sake of sinners.

If an illustration of the law of the cross is needed closer to us in time, one might think of Martin Luther King, and of the way in which the metaphors associated with Christ's death recur in King's story. From the beginning of his work for civil rights, he knew that his efforts could bring him death. Two years before it happened, he said: "I choose to live for and with those for whom life is one long, desolate corridor with no exit sign. This is the way I'm going. If it means suffering a little, I'm going that way. If it means sacrifice, I'm going that way. And if it means dying for them, I'm going that way, because I heard a voice saying, 'Do something for others.'" To keep on going that way took fidelity and courage, virtues still in evidence in the speech he gave the evening before he was assassinated. He had just mentioned renewed threats against his life, but he expressed his confidence that God's work would move forward: "I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter to me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like everybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

One reviewer of a film about King, Eyes on the Prize, said people will find themselves "weeping tears of joy and gratitude at the price that was paid by Martin Luther King and others to buy freedom for men and women of color." The tears are of joy and gratitude, not of sorrow and anger. She was thinking not about James Earl Ray and what he did, but about Martin Luther King and what he did.

St. Augustine said something similar fifteen hundred years ago. The Suffering Servant had no beauty or comeliness to him, and yet he was the "fairest among the sons of men." It takes the eyes of faith to see the beauty in the ugliness, Augustine said. And what is the beauty that we love in Christ? he asked. "The crucified limbs? The pierced side? Or the love? When we hear that he suffered for us, what do we love? The love is loved. He loved us so that we might love him back, and that we might be able to love him back, he visited us with his Spirit." And from there come the tears of joy and gratitude that the Christian church has wept for two millennia.

Rev. Joseph A. Komonchak, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, holds the John C. and Gertrude P. Hubbard Chair in Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America.