Bound in Love

On the second Sunday of Lent, the gospel is always about the Transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor, where the three leading apostles are shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that this Jesus they have been following is more than a Rabbi or even the Messiah anointed by God. The Transfiguration manifests the reality that Jesus actually is God. He converses with the heroes of the Old Testament, and then the Father’s voice comes from heaven and announces, “this is my son.”

The reading from the Old Testament is about the sacrifice of a son by his father. This boy is truly a human person, one who was born and one who will die. As human beings, we have two unavoidable realities. The first is that we are made in God’s image and enjoy the tremendous honor of that as well as the associated responsibility. The second is that because our original earthly parents — Adam and Eve — seriously fumbled their responsibilities, we are all going to die.

This is the human struggle in a nutshell. We are made in the divine image yet we wallow in the muck of sin and death. We were not made for where we find ourselves. The Transfiguration shines the light on the way out of our predicament.

These two readings, one from the Old Testament, and one from the Gospels, help us to understand the question of satisfaction.

What do we mean by satisfaction?

We mean we understand that actions have consequences. We understand that a sin is an action taken against the will of God. We commit a sin when we say to ourselves, “I don’t want to do what God wants me to do; I choose to do what I want to do even though he doesn’t want me to.” Since a sin is an action, and since actions have consequences, something is required by justice to balance out the action or sin that we have committed. It is simple justice that if I steal your car, I somehow owe you a car even if the judge lets me off because I’m poor. Even though I received absolution from stealing the car, I still kind of owe you a car.

So satisfaction is the term we use to focus on the debt that still needs to be repaid even if there was an act of mercy made on behalf of the sinner. All of us, I hope, have experienced the mercy at the heart of the sacrament of confession. We go into the confessional with a list of the actions that we took in full knowledge that they were against God’s will yet we did them anyway. The priest — acting in the person of Christ — says in so many words, “I know. I still love you. Go out and try again. Oh, and say a Hail Mary while you’re out there.” Now if our sin is that we were mean to our little brother, the concept of satisfaction is a little bit harder to grasp. We can stop being mean to our little brother. But if our sin was something serious, like stealing or lying, or being seriously angry, or resenting another person’s blessings, then a Hail Mary probably doesn’t actually balance the account, does it?

So when it comes to what happened in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve turned away from God, we have a major problem of satisfaction. This was a huge sin against God. Adam and Eve did not struggle with concupiscence as all of us do, so it was an entirely free choice to turn away from God’s commandments. Thanks to them, all of us are born with concupiscence, and all of us are born destined to die an earthly death.

But we were made in the image and likeness of God, our heavenly father. That means we were made for eternal life. And we are guaranteed an eternal existence. Our bodies may be separated at death from our souls for a time, but we will always be.

Our God is a God of love, and his will for us is to be with him for our eternal existence. But thanks to Adam and Eve, we carry this unpayable debt to God. There is no life that we can live that will balance these accounts. There is no way we can save up enough merits to avoid eternal separation from God.

But God doesn’t want eternal separation for us. And that is why he sent his son on Christmas Day. The transgression of original sin was so great that no human person can repay this sin against the eternal God. But because the transgression was made by a human person, then it is only right and proper that a human person pay the price.

And here we have the problem. St. Anselm wrote about this in the 11th century in a little book called “Why did God Become Man?” In this book he explained that God became man in the second person of the holy Trinity in order to solve this problem of satisfaction. A sin so great committed by mankind against God could not be paid back by a human person due to his finite nature and God’s infinite nature, yet it must be paid back by a human person since it was committed by mankind against God.

Today on Mount Tabor, three of the apostles know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus is truly God. The whole of his earthly ministry, and especially his crucifixion and death on Good Friday, show beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus truly is a human person. Jesus, the incarnate Word, can be the self-offering that pays the debt incurred by all of humanity as reflected in Adam and Eve. Only God-made-Man can pay the debt that Man owes to God. Jesus on the Cross redeems us all and satisfies the debt incurred by Adam and Eve.

On the Fridays of Lent, we offer the Stations of the Cross as a communal penitential act. At each station, we repeat this: “We adore you O Christ and we bless you; because by your holy cross you have redeemed of the world.” St. Anselm’s satisfaction theory is encapsulated in that refrain. The next time you participate in the Stations, reflect on those words and take them to heart. Each time in the Mass we come to the Eucharistic consecration, receive the fruits of the Cross and adore the One who made the satisfactory sacrifice.