Why did Jesus have to die to save us? And how is that saving us? (Part II)
Last week I mentioned some of the Scriptures about this that Jesus fulfilled. This week I will try to answer the same question just in terms of reason. Often the related question to yours is if God is all-powerful, why couldn’t He have just willed that we be saved and it would have happened instead of sending His Son to die for us. Certainly, there was a better or easier way.
Sure, I think there might have been an “easier” way, but I assure you there was no better way…at least not for us. St. Anselm described our sins as a sort of “stealing” from God. We could be forgiven by Him, but we still owed restitution out of justice. Yet, we have nothing to pay God back with. Our life is a gift from God, and even when we die, we are just receiving what we deserve because of our sins. We have nothing on our own with which to pay back God, so the Son of God took care of it for us by Himself becoming man and giving God the Father what we owed Him. The sacrifice of Jesus, who is both God and man, innocent of any sin, was of such great, even infinite value that it restored all of humanity and paid back any debt we owe to God.
Another way to look at it is that by sinning, we die. To sin is to deny God who is our Maker, our Source of Life. We turn away from Life itself, and thus we die—first spiritually, then the body follows. We have no way to save ourselves, no way to restore our life without outside help. God in His great love did not want to leave us in this state of death, therefore He became one of us; He showed us how to live and even how to die. Jesus by dying destroyed death and transformed it from the consequence of sin to an act of perfect obedience and love for God our Father. Not only that but perhaps most importantly, by Jesus’ rising from the dead, He opened the pathway to new life for us. What we need to do then is to be united to Christ, to join our death with His and thus to share in His new life, His resurrection. We do this through Baptism. We continue to do this through the rest of our life by receiving His Body and Blood in the Eucharist, by receiving the Sacraments, by our own personal prayer and actions. In fact, every day we must “die” with Christ so that we may also rise with Him. Have a happy Easter!
-Fr. Greg
