Angles on the Paschal Mystery
Jesus’ work in the Upper Room and on the Cross is multi-dimensional. There are many things going on, many things that Christ accomplishes and there are different perspectives that we can take on it. It would be kind of like observing a beautiful statue, a fine piece of art, in a museum. You can walk around that statue and view it from different angles and from each angle you have a different appreciation of what the artist was accomplishing in that work of art. We’re going to take five different angles on Christ’s Paschal Mystery, His Death, Resurrection, the establishment of the new covenant, that entire work that He accomplishes in Passion Week.
The first angle we’re going to take is the angle of Redemption. In one sense, what Jesus is doing on the cross and in the upper room is paying the price for our sin. He’s paying a debt that we owe to God, that we could not pay. For example, in Hebrews 9:15, we read, “Therefore, He is the mediator of a new covenant so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance since a death has occurred which redeems them from the transgression under the first covenant.” That idea of redeeming is the idea of paying a price that you owe and because you are not able to pay it yourself, you are in bondage and in slavery.
As you see, we are God’s servants, we are created to be God’s servants. In justice, we owed God service. We owed him worship. We owed him our lives, all of our actions, we owed that to God in rights in justice because we are His creatures. We have failed to pay that service to God. There’s something that we owe to God, we owe to God the gift of all of our actions, all of our lives. That debt needs to be paid.
Jesus pays that debt. He gives to God the perfect sacrifice, the most meritorious sacrifice of supreme value because His life is not just an individual human life but it’s the life of the Son of God. He is, in a mysterious way, the mystery of the Trinity, He is God Himself, living out a life where all of His actions are an act of worship to the Father. Jesus does that, He lives and leads the perfect life, the perfect life of service that has so much merit in God’s eyes, it can pay the debt of service that’s owed by the whole human family. He is willing to pay that debt for all who are willing to allow Him to do that for them, and that is involved in receiving Christ, giving our lives to Him. We accept His payment on our behalf.
A similar idea to this idea of redemption, or paying the debt that we owe to God, is the idea of being ransomed from the control of the devil. In ancient times, when you owed a debt that you could not pay, you were given over to a jailor. In different passages of Scripture, Satan is likened to the jailor who has control over those who owe the debt. In Mark 10:45 we read, “For the Son of Man also came not to be served but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many.” There, we have that image of ransoming; from whom is Jesus ransoming us? A ransom is an amount of money that you pay to get somebody back from the control of another. That would be Satan, into whose control we have given our lives by failure to pay that debt of service to God.
Redemption not only pays the debt that we owe to God but simultaneously frees us from what we might call the debtor’s prison of the devil’.
The second thing that Christ’s Paschal Mystery accomplishes for us is atonement. Atonement is a kind of judicial concept. To atone for someone means to accept the punishment that they deserved in order to extinguish the judicial case against them. Christ accepts the punishment that’s due for our sin. We disobeyed God, the just punishment for the disobedience is death, but Jesus dies in our place.
It’s not simply a kind of “penal substitution” where somebody’s guilty and then you take an innocent person, you kill that innocent person on behalf of the guilty person. That would actually be a miscarriage of justice. You do, in fact, see salvation presented in that way by different Protestant evangelists and theologians. That’s not quite the right way to think about it. It’s true that Jesus accepts death for us, but, you see, Jesus is our Sacred King and we are His nation. Just like a king might offer Himself on behalf of His whole nation, maybe offer his life to the enemy if the enemy would spare the rest of the nation, that is what Jesus does for us.
Then, Jesus’ death is not something that takes place apart from us or away from us. Jesus’ death is communicated to us in our baptism. When we are baptized, we undergo Jesus’ death. We are joined to Him in His death and then we are raised with Him to new life. We participate in Jesus’ death and resurrection and then our baptism marks our whole life so that all of our sufferings and ultimately our own personal deaths become participations in Christ’s suffering and death, which He accepts because of our sin.
Our sufferings and our death are no longer just our own, but they are joined to the sufferings and death of Jesus and because they are joined to Jesus’, they have great value in God’s eyes and they become redemptive and they become atoning. Jesus didn’t die so that we don’t have to. Jesus died to make our deaths meritorious in God’s eyes. That’s kind of a difference between a Protestant understanding and a Catholic understanding.
Thirdly, Jesus’ Paschal Mystery involves liberation from the devil, which is a kind of military image. 1 John 3:8 says, “He who commits sin is of the devil, for the devil has sinned from the beginning.” The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. Likewise, Colossians 1:13 says, “He has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son.” It’s a similar way to thinking of being ransomed from the devil, but more of a military image of Jesus defeating the devil in a combat of strength because Our Lord’s power is infinitely greater than the power of Satan.
Jesus’ death and resurrection is a definitive breaking of the devil’s power. The devil has the power of death, Jesus defied the devil’s power through His resurrection. That defeat of Satan can be applied to anyone who will accept it and the way to accept that defeat and liberation of the devil in your own life is through repentance and reception of the Sacraments. All of the Sacraments have an exorcistic power to them, but in a particular way, Baptism and Confession. I’ll leave that for further discussion when we talk about spiritual warfare aspects, etc. in other lessons. The confessional is the first line of defense in most cases for deliverance ministry against the powers of evil. When we confess our sins, we become liberated from the power of Satan.