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Fourth Sunday of
Lent (Laetare Sunday)
Thoughts for the Week - Fr. R. Taouk
11th March 2018
The Passion
Its Causes - Human and Divine
by Rev.
Fr. Joseph Wilhelm D.D., Ph.D.
The repeated assertion of Scripture that God gave His Son
for us implies a direct intention on the part of God, and of
Christ Himself as God, that the Saviour should suffer death.
The Divine intention directly bore on the good arising out
of Christ's sufferings, viz. the glory of God and the
salvation of mankind. Hence God caused the sufferings,
inasmuch as He gave Christ the mandate to suffer, and
inspired Him with the willingness to carry out the mandate,
at the same time permitting the immediate authors of the
Passion to work unchecked. He intended the Passion as a
means to higher ends, and did not prevent it as He might
have done.
In the same manner Christ Himself caused His own Passion and
death. His complying with the Divine mandate is a perfect
act of obedience (Rom. 5). Directly, the Saviour caused,
e.g. His sadness for the sins of man and the Agony in the
Garden; indirectly, the persecutions which His open and
fearless teaching challenged, and which He did not resist
with His Divine power. Hence His sufferings exhibit the most
perfect self-sacrifice: He died of His own will, renouncing
the use of His Divine power to save Himself, and using His
dominion over His own life to lay it down as the perfect
victim of His great Sacrifice (John 10).
Besides the soldiers who crucified Jesus, three moral human
causes of His death are to be considered: Judas, who
delivered Him to the Jews; the Jews who, moved by hatred,
gave Him up to the Romans; and the Roman authorities who, to
please the Jews, commanded the Crucifixion. The co-operation
of human causes was necessary if Christ had to die the
shameful death of the Cross. God permitted this greatest of
crimes in order to make sin subservient to its own
destruction. The sin of the Jews, taken objectively, differs
from all other sins in this, that it directly strikes at a
Divine Person, whereas all other sins only affect the
Divinity externally. Taken subjectively, the guilt of the
deicide was diminished in many by their ignorance, however
culpable that ignorance may have been. For these the Saviour
implored forgiveness with His last breath, "Father, forgive
them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23), although He
had said of them, after the Last Supper, " All these things
they will do to you for My Name's sake, because they know
not Him that sent Me. If I had not come and spoken to them,
they would not have sin; but now they have no excuse for
their sin. He that hates Me, hates My Father also. If I had
not done among them the works that no other man hath done,
they would not have sin; but now they have both seen and
hated both Me and the Father" (John 15).
The human causes of Christ's Passion were instruments of
Satan, under whose instigation they acted. The Fathers dwell
on this point in connection with the Protoevangelium, in
which they see foretold the great war between Christ and
Satan, ending in the crushing of Satan's head under the heel
of Christ.
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