2 of 4
Graphic meditation on Christ's suffering doesn't appear before the late medieval era, approximately the 14th century. Before that, the presentation is more in accord with the way Christ appears in the Gospel of John. In iconography, he reigns serene from the Cross, a victorious conqueror who has rescued us from Death.
In fact, the concept of "rescue" is the key. The wounds that Christ sustained are like those of a hero. Imagine that a young policeman has rescued some hostages at great physical cost, including his own capture and torture. It would be unseemly, even insulting, to continually ask him, "How did it feel when they tortured you? What did it look like? Where did you bleed?" The officer would understandably wish you'd focus not on his humiliation but on his victory.
That's the attitude we see in ancient hymns from Holy Week:
The sun was darkened, for it could not bear to see such outrage done to God, before whom all things tremble. … When Thou was crucified, O Christ, all the creation saw and trembled. The foundations of the earth quaked in fear of thy power. The lights of heaven hid themselves. … The hosts of angels were amazed.
A hymn from the 4th-century Liturgy of St. Basil is familiar even to some Protestants: "Let all earthly flesh keep silent, and with fear and trembling stand."
Devotion didn't simply change with the times; the same awe-filled reticence continues unchanged in Eastern Orthodox worship today. Something else happened to cause a profound change in European Christianity's understanding of salvation. Western theologians usually say that the greatest event in the development of salvation theology was the publication of the treatise "Why Did God Become Man?" by Anselm, the 11th-century Archbishop of Canterbury. Before Anselm, as we've seen, the focus was on Christ's victory rather than on his sufferings as the means of salvation. "The wages of sin is Death," and due to our sins we were enslaved by death, poisoned and helpless to resist sin. Christ comes on a rescue mission, and in the process he suffers very much like that policeman rescuing the hostages. As a human, he dies and gains entrance to Hades; as God, he blasts it open and sets the captives free. It is in this sense—so Christians in the first millennium understood—that Scripture speaks of Christ's death as a ransom for many.
Some early writers elaborated on the question "Who received this ransom?," unwisely it would seem. Today their analogies seem crude—for example, that God lured the Devil by hiding Christ's divinity inside his humanity, and the Devil responded like a fish grabbing a baited hook (Gregory of Nyssa) or like a mouse going into a trap (Augustine).
But when we speak of Christ paying with his blood, we don't necessarily have to imagine a two-sided transaction. The brave policeman, above, "paid with his blood" to free the hostages, but that doesn't mean the kidnappers were left gloating over a vial of blood. When the Lord ransomed his people out of Egypt, Pharaoh did not accept a fat bag of gold in exchange. "Redeem" can just mean "doing what is necessary to set free."
Further, the young officer might have said "I offer this mission to the honor of my chief, who has always been like a dad to me. I love him and want to do his will, and I am making this sacrifice in his name." The chief didn't receive the young man's blood either—a bizarre thought—nor did he require that blood before the hostages were freed; he was not their captor but rather an ally in the rescue. So take a step back and see these terms in a looser sense. Sometimes we use images like "paid" to mean a simple act of giving, without envisioning a two-sided transaction that includes a receiving on the other end.
share this page
RSS Feed
