Love such that we cannot understand Part II

Jesus was crucified because that was the form of capital punishment in use for non-Roman citizens in the first century empire – is endued with a kaleidoscopic range of symbolic meanings. And, at the heart of all this is precisely that “love such that we cannot understand” from which we began.

So, Thomas tells us, granted that Jesus had to die at all, it was indeed most suitable that it should be this in way, first, because it provides us with yet another incitement to virtue: in this case, the virtue of courage. Crucifixion, being a particularly painful way to die, is also therefore a particularly frightening way, and there is thus comfort to be found in seeing how Christ embraced his cross, reflecting on this may help us overcome the fear, not merely of death itself, but of the sufferings which may, in the words of St Alphonsus Liguori in his mediations on the Stations of the Cross, accompany our death. But in addition, there are a whole range of perhaps to us more surprising reasons for considering the Cross to be the most appropriate way for Jesus to die. St Thomas evokes first of all the symmetry beloved of so many of the Fathers of the Church: it was a tree that brought about the downfall of our first parents in Eden; it is fitting therefore, that human restoration to friendship with God should be achieved on the tree of the Cross. 

It is also significant for Thomas that the Crucifixion involves the literal exaltation, the lifting up, of Jesus. In the first place, this is because thereby not only the earth on which God has walked during the period of the Incarnation, but now also the air above the earth is hallowed by his presence. Again, I think it is intriguing and rather beautiful to see Thomas writing in this cosmic vein – and it’s not the only place where he does so. In his account of the Baptism of the Lord for instance, he is insistent that the primary reason for the apparent anomaly of the one who is no need of cleansing seeking baptism is that water is therefore cleansed and sanctified by his presence. But the lifting up of Jesus on Calvary also symbolizes for Thomas our being lifted up to heaven: the exaltation it makes possible. The fact that the Cross extends in four directions, meanwhile, symbolizes the universal reach of Christ’s saving work: extending to the four corners of the world.

Thomas also draws our attention to a memorable and moving image used by St Augustine of the Cross as professorial chair: it is from this seat, above all, that Jesus teaches us. And then there is of course that whole range of references in the OT to wood in which Thomas sees the wood of the Cross foreshadowed: the wooden ark in which Noah escaped the flood, the wooden rod with which Moses parted the Red Sea, the wooden ark of the covenant, all of which speak powerfully of the liberating divine presence with the OT people of God (do check the Abraham and Isaac thing).

All of this comes from the corpus of the article, where Thomas sets out his own positive vision of the fittingness of the Cross. But perhaps most striking of all is the way in which he responds to one perceived objection to his position here. He has his imaginary interlocutor demand why, if, as everyone knows, the sacrificial system of the OT prefigures the perfect sacrifice of Christ, Jesus was not killed by being dismembered limb from limb, and nor was his body consumed by fire. This, after all, seems to have been the way in which sacrificial animals were generally dispatched under the Old Law. Thomas’s response is a wonderful balance of the common-sense and the profoundly symbolic. The fact that the OT sacrifices were consumed by fire means that there was wood involved here, and that’s enough to make these cultic events a prefiguration of the Cross. After all, as Thomas robustly remarks, quoting St John Damascene, it is not necessary that a symbolic representation of a think should resemble it in every conceivable way, otherwise it wouldn’t be a symbolic representation but the think itself. But, more substantially, Jesus is not dismembered with a sword because of the terrible significance that this would have for ecclesiology: providing an excuse for “those who would divide the Church” as he puts it. And, above all, fire is not lacking on Calvary, but the flames that the OT burnt offerings foreshadow are not literal ones, but the fire of divine charity that brings Jesus to the Cross for us. As the office hymn for Christ the King has it “the sharp spear that through thee ran/laid bare the heart that burned for man”. Love such that we cannot understand indeed.

So, finally, let’s turn to those questions of causation that have perhaps been worrying away at the back of our minds throughout this talk, and perhaps throughout this weekend. This is in Question 47 of the Third Part of the Summa. First of all, Thomas asks who was responsible for the death of Jesus, who, in his terminology, was the efficient cause of the Passion. This is important for two reasons, I think. First, it’s important because of what it says about human involvement in the events of the first Good Friday, and secondly it’s important because of what it says about God’s involvement, both issues of acute, and sometimes neuralgic controversy in the history of theology, with practical consequences in the history of the Church.

As regards the first, the question of human culpability for the death of Christ, significantly Thomas’s conviction that Jesus dies for all of humanity cuts the ground decisively from under any attempts to recruit the Passion narrative for the cause of Anti-Semitism (despite the determination, alas, of many in Christian history to do just that). As Christ died for both Jews and Gentiles, it is fitting that both Jews and Gentiles should have been among those bringing about his death, so that the event of the Passion symbolizes its effects: as Thomas puts it:

The effects of Christ’s Passion was foreshown by the very manner of his death. For Christ’s Passion wrought its effect of salvation first of all among the Jews, very many of whom were baptized in his death, as is evident from Acts 2.41 and Acts 4.4. Afterwards, by the preaching of Jews, Christ’s Passion passed on to the Gentiles. Consequently, it was fitting that Christ should begin his sufferings at the hands of the Jews, and after they had delivered him up, finish his Passion at the hands of the Gentiles. [2]

As regards the second, Thomas does ask the uncomfortable question: can God be said to have willed the death of his own Son – and he does answer in the affirmative.[3] That this is not to be seen as a question of a capriciously vengeful deity feeling spited by human infidelity and taking it out on the one perfect human life lived in perfect fidelity -  what has sometimes been characterized as the theology of the cosmic whipping boy - is clear from a careful examination of his argument. But we do have to acknowledge that this is the starting point. Jesus suffers by his own will, but that will is perfectly attuned to that of his heavenly Father. As Thomas puts it:

Christ suffered voluntarily out of obedience to the Father. Hence in three respects, God the Father did deliver up Christ to the Passion. In the first way, because by his eternal will he preordained Christ’s Passion for the deliverance of the huma race, according to the words of Isaiah (53.6) “the Lord hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all” and, again (Is 5/10) “the Lord was pleased to bruise him in infirmity. Secondly, inasmuch as by the infusion of charity he inspired him with the will to suffer for us; hence we read in the same passage, “he was offered byecause it was his own will. Thirdly, by not shielding him from the Pasion but abandoning him to his persecutors.

So, God the Father wills the death of Jesus, and Jesus willingly obeys, for the deliverance of the human race, which clearly cannot deliver itself, and which requires the Lord to lay upon him the iniquities of us all. At this point, we might wonder, how, if at all, does Aquinas’ position on the Atonement differ from that we might associate. Perhaps, at its most sophisticated with a figure such as John Calvin, or, more humbly with members of the student Christian organization the UCCF, who at any rate are supposed to hold that “sinful human beings are redeemed from the guilt, penalty and power of sin through the sacrificial death once and for all time of their representative and substitute,  Jesus Christ, the only mediator between them and God”. Granted, on this account, as again on any remotely clear-sighted reading of the scriptures, Jesus own will is intimately associated and aligned with that of his Father: it is not merely, then, a matter of the Father punishing Jesus arbitrarily for a sin he has not committed. But still, Jesus hasn’t committed any sin. What sense, moral or intellectual, can it possibly make for him to be punished in our stead, or even, to use slightly less edgy language drawn from civil rather than criminal law, for God to accept from him the compensation we should pay? The answer to this, ultimately is actually a matter of ecclesiology, of our understanding of what, or rather who, the Church is. It is, in other words, rooted in what it means to speak of the Church as the Body of Christ. Thomas’s is a profoundly counter-cultural answer in the modern and post-modern context, but it taps into some very large and suggestive questions, not only about the nature of culpability for wrong-doing, but about our very identity.

In question 49 of the Third Part of the Summa[4], Thomas asks this very question I’ve just been sketching. How could it possibly make sense to say that the Passion of Christ delivers me from my sins, us from ours? Granted that there is something objectively wrong that needs setting right in my/our relationship with God, how can anyone other than I/we achieve this? After all, it probably does intuitively strike most of us as both incoherent and unjust that one person should be punished in place of another, and supremely so, if the one undergoing the punishment is radically innocent as the Son of God must be. And this assessment is predicated on assumptions about human identity that seem so common-sensical that they are rarely examined, still less challenged.  Clearly, if I have committed a crime, and Sr Valery is punished for it, that is unjust, precisely because I am I and Sr Valery is Sr Valery. But it is exactly this distinction that is shockingly, radically called in question by Thomas’s understanding of the Church.

Earlier in the Third Part of the Summa, in his treatment of the Incarnation, Thomas has made it clear that it is for him no mere picture language to talk about the Church as the body, indeed, the mystical body of Christ. Rather, we are to take that expression with literal seriousness.[5] When, in company with St Paul, we call Jesus the head of the body the Church, we are not talking metaphorically, saying for example simply that he is the inspiration for what the Church does. Rather, to say that Jesus is the head of the body the Church is to say that the Church and Jesus are one organism (which is why, of course, on the Road to Damascus, Saul hears the Lord saying not, “why are you seeking to destroy the organization I set up” or even “why are you giving my friends such a hard time” but “Saul, why are you persecuting me”). And this, ultimately, is what it makes it neither unjust nor incoherent to talk of Jesus paying the price for our sins, even being punished in our stead. As Thomas puts it:

Christ’s passion causes forgiveness of sins by way of redemption. For, since he is our head, then, by the Passio which he endured from love and obedience, he delivered us his members from our sins, as by the price of his Passion: in the same way as if a man by the good industry of his hands were to redeem himself from a sin committed with his feet. For, just as the natural body is one though made up of diverse members, so the whole Church, Christ’s mystic body, is reckoned as one person with its head, which is Christ. [6]

We really are that closely united to Christ. Our sufferings and joys are his, and his ours. And his actions and his Passion save us, in a sway that no one external to us could ever do, because we are not external to him. That, surely, is love such that we cannot understand.

And that brings me to that other place in the voluminous writings of St Thomas that I promised we’d glance at, which nicely illustrates the extent to which he pushes this idea of the solidarity with Christ that is implied by speaking of us as members of his body. This is St Thomas’s exegesis of that most troubling and theologically perplexing of the Saviour’s seven last words from the Cross, which brings us back to those articles to do with the defects of body and soul we were considering earlier. [7]

What can it possibly mean, if we hold that Jesus is God incarnate, for him to cry out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” How can God forsake himself? How can God believe that God has forsaken him? One rather common answer given by both the Fathers and medieval theologians is that the Lord, in quoting the beginning of psalm 22, the psalm par excellence in which we see the Passion foreshadowed, is intending that his audience at the foot of the Cross should understand that he means not just the opening line of the psalm which he cries aloud, but the whole of it. And Thomas doesn’t disagree.  Now, of course, the argument runs, Psalm 22 concludes triumphantly, with talk of the poor being satisfied and praising God in the assembly, so what is going on here is not the deeply disturbing phenomenon of Jesus being unaware of his Father’s presence but simply a victory song drawn from the liturgy of his people.  Not everyone, of course, finds this a convincing explanation, but Thomas’ particular take on it is certainly a richly suggestive one, to say the least.

At first sight, however, he seems actually to dig himself deeper into an exegetical hole, making it even harder to see how the sinless one who is the omnipotent God incarnate could speak in this way, even in the abject suffering of the Cross. This is because the Latin Vulgate translation of the psalm, which Thomas would have read, differs significantly from what we are used to. If Jesus was indeed alluding to the entirety of Psalm 22 by quoting its opening line, the very next verse, as Thomas would have read it, after “my God, my God why have you forsaken me” does not continue “and are so far from the words of my groaning” as we hear every Holy Week. Rather, what Thomas imagines Jesus invoking in the minds of his scripturally literate hearers is considerably more shocking, because that second verse of the psalm reads “the outcome of my sins puts me far from my salvation”.

Jesus speak here, it seems, not as an innocent man baffled by God’s absence, but as a guilty man, pleading for forgiveness.

Thomas is of course adamant that Jesus is without sin. But he is also convinced that when he days “My God, my God why have you forsaken me”, in itself a deeply perplexing thing for him to say, he did indeed mean the whole darned psalm, including that profoundly anomalous confession of sin. But it is, of course, only anomalous if we forget one of the cardinal rules for the interpretation of scripture bequeathed to Thomas by his Patristic forbears, and especially by St Augustine. Augustine incidentally, interestingly enough, adopted it from the writings of one Tychonius, a leading figure in the Donatist schism which caused him so much trouble in the early days of his episcopate, thus nicely illustrating Thomas’ own dictum that one shouldn’t be too fussy about the sources from which one acquires one’s theological resources: if something is true, it remains true, even if it was first said by a heretic or a schismatic – not perhaps without significance in our own milieu also. The rule in question is that since “Christ and his Church are reckoned as one person”, things – like the accusation of personal sinfulness – that would be scandalously inappropriate, indeed meaningless, if applied to the man Jesus of Nazareth, clearly can in another sense be quite fittingly predicated of Christ, since they do apply, all too evidently alas, to the members of his body the Church. Thus, as Thomas sums it up, “Christ speaking in the person of his members says “the outcry of my sins” without this meaning that there was sin in the head himself.

It is because we are so closely united with Christ that we are, through our membership of his Church, one person with him that the obedience he renders to the Father is truly our obedience, cancelling the debt of our sins and opening to us the gates of heaven.  That he should, with his Father, will it to be so is indeed love such that we cannot understand.