People would pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem from across the known world to worship, often bringing money to purchase oxen, sheep, or doves for sacrifices to God. So vendors had set up shop in the Temple’s outermost court exchanging foreign currencies into Hebrew coins for a percentage fee and selling animals for a healthy profit. God, however, had designated that large, marble-paved court as the Court of the Gentiles where non-Jews (that is, the Gentiles) could come to worship him at his Temple. The Father willed his Temple to be “a house of prayer for all the nations,” but the moneychangers and animal sellers were making it a noisy, smelly “marketplace.” And by charging unlawful interest and demanding excessive prices even of the poor, they were also “making it a den of thieves.”
A place intended to be free for holy worship and communion with God had become unclean, profaned by sin. So Jesus personally comes to Jerusalem at the time of Passover and does something dramatic. He zealously cleanses the Temple, conquering evil, achieving justice, restoring relationship between God and man, drawing people to himself, and indeed sacrificing himself; for when the chief priests and scribes heard of this incident they began seeking a way to put him to death. Their plotting would lead to the Pascal Mystery at the heart of The Apostles’ Creed:
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died and was buried,
he descended into hell,
on the third day he rose again from the dead,
he ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.
Why does Jesus Christ do these things? Because sin had caused the human race to fall far from God and paradise. Suffering, dying, and being barred from Heaven were our human lot. We had become slaves to sin and the Evil One, held hostage against our will. Our offenses against the All-Holy One required an incalculable repayment. And our separation from God had made us doubtful of his goodness and love for us. It was a slavery we could not escape, a debt of justice we could not repay, and a broken relationship we could not heal. But God had a plan to save us. He would aid humanity with his divinity by fashioning a remedy for us out of our weakness and suffering and mortality, that from fallout of our downfall would come the means to our salvation. By his Incarnation, the Son of God enters our sinful world as one of us and by his Pascal Mystery sets us free, cleansing us, for holy worship and communion with God. First, Jesus assumes our nature, and then he offers a perfect sacrifice.
As the Letter to the Hebrews says, since we “share in blood and Flesh, Jesus likewise shared in them, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the Devil, and free those who through fear of death had been subject to slavery all their life.” Jesus said that he came “to give his life as a ransom for many.” And lest it be unclear, St. Paul proclaims that the Lord “gave himself as a ransom for all.” Christ’s death frees the slaves and ransoms the captives, and now saints and angels sing to Jesus, the Lamb of God, in Heaven: “Worthy are you… for you were slain and with your blood you purchased for God those from every tribe and tongue, people and nation.”
To some, the idea of Almighty God dying on a cross seems impossible, unbecoming foolishness. Yet Christ crucified is the power and wisdom of God. “The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.” This mysterious, hidden, wisdom, planned by God before the ages for our glory, was not understood by the devil and his demons; “for if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” In sinning God, Adam had handed himself and his descendants into the devil’s clutches, but in crucifying Christ (the sinless New Adam) the serpent overplays his hand and loses big. St. Augustine uses the image of a mousetrap in which Jesus is the bait. The devil takes this bait in putting Jesus on the Cross, but by shedding Christ’s innocent blood the devil is forced to release his claims on those who are joined to Christ. The trap snapped down and crushed the serpent.
Jesus’ sacrifice was also able to pay the incredible debt of human sins before God. All sin is wrong, but consider which sin is worse: to lie to a stranger or to betray a friend; to slap your enemy or to slap your mother? The greater the generous goodness and love that a person has shown us, the greater is the offense of our trespasses against them. So how great a crime then are our sins against God, whose love created us and from whom all good things come? How very great a debt of justice must then be satisfied? Our sins caused a debt no sinner could repay. God had commanded his Old Covenant people to offer animal sacrifices for their sins, the idea being that the creature was dying in the place of the sinner whose sins had merited death. However, as the Letter to the Hebrews says, “it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats take away sins. For this reason, when [Jesus] came into the world, he said: ‘Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; holocausts and sin offerings you took no delight in. Then I said, as is written of me in the scroll, “Behold, I come to do your will, O God.”’”
Jesus Christ, God become man, perfectly fulfills the Law, keeping the commandments and doing his Father’s will. He lives for God without sin, honoring his Father and mother, proclaiming the Kingdom of God without idolatry or blasphemy, without murder or adultery, without thievery or lying or coveting, but with abundant love. And in his death, Christ obediently offers the perfect, acceptable sacrifice we were incapable of on our own; a divinely-perfected offering of humanity to God. By his Incarnation, Jesus has in a certain way united himself with every human person, inviting them to become one with him. Through his sacraments, we are more perfectly joined to Jesus to share in his life and enjoy the benefits of what he has accomplished. Christ is the Victor over sin and death, over the tomb and the underworld, over the world and the devil, and he invites us to partake in his victory.
In the beginning, though the Holy Trinity did not desire humanity to sin and fall, our freely-chosen rebellion did not come as a surprise. Before Creation, the eternal, all-knowing Trinity foreknew what it would cost to save us. And God still said Yes, “Let there be light.” Jesus Christ was freely delivered up crucifixion by lawless men according to the set plan and foreknowledge of God, as foreshadowed by the Old Testament Scriptures. But could God, if he had wished, before Creation or in the course of time, have ordained a manner for the Son’s saving sacrifice other than dying upon a Roman Cross? If so, if there were other unchosen options, then the Cross of Christ was chosen as a most effective and compelling sign for us. A less painful, less ignoble, less public, less striking death — if such a death could have saved us — would not speak to us so clearly as a powerful sign of God’s love for us as this. Jesus makes himself so vulnerable and so lowly so as to awaken a response of love in our hearts. He extends his arms on the Cross in hopes that the whole world will be drawn to his embrace. As Jesus said, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.”
After Jesus died, the Apostles’ Creed says, “he descended into hell.” What are we to make of this? Death is the separation of one’s soul from one’s body. On Holy Saturday, while Jesus’ dead body laid in his sealed tomb keeping a perfect Sabbath rest, Jesus’ soul visited the souls of those in the realm of the dead. Our creed translates this abode of the dead (called “Sheol” in Hebrew or “Hades” in Greek) as “hell” because all souls there, whether righteous or unrighteous, were deprived of the vision of God. But this does not mean that the situations of the Just and Unjust there were identical. Jesus’ Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus describes the afterlife before the gates of Heaven had opened, showing Lazarus comforted in the bosom of Father Abraham while the uncaring, anonymous rich man (whose name is not written in the Book of Life) suffers torment in the flames.
Jesus descends to hell as Savior, proclaiming the Good News to the souls imprisoned there. He does not descend into hell to deliver the damned, nor to destroy the hell of damnation, but to free the souls of the Just. Jesus had said, “Amen, amen, I say to you, the hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.” By proclaiming the Gospel in the underworld and inviting souls to Heaven, Jesus extends his saving victory to all the faithful people who had preceded him in death.
On the third day he rose again from the dead,
he ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.
I do not have the time to speak much about these lines this Sunday, but in closing, note what St. Paul beautifully observes about Christ in his Letter to the Philippians:
Though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at. Rather, he emptied himself and took the form of a slave, Being born in the likeness of men, …it was thus that he humbled himself, obediently accepting even death, death on a cross!
Because of this, God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every other name, so that at Jesus’ name every knee must bend in the heavens, on the earth, and under the earth, and every tongue proclaim to the glory of God the Father: Jesus Christ is Lord!
Jesus empties himself in his Incarnation, humbles himself in his holy obedience, submits himself to his Passion and death, descends to the depths of the underworld, lower and lower and then Jesus is raised up from there, higher and higher, to life and rewards, glory and honor and power, enthroned at the favored righthand of God the Father. St. Paul says to “have among yourselves the same attitude” as this in your Christian life, for as Jesus teaches, “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”
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