FECTS OF THE PASSION OF CHRIST - Saint Thomas Aquinas

 

EFFECTS OF PASSION ...

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    Whom the Lord grants greater power to test them and achieve greater victories. Saint Peter depicts him as a roaring lion around the faithful of Christ, looking for someone to devour (1 Petr. 5,8). And more dramatically, Saint John paints us the dragon, the ancient serpent, the devil, incarnated in the powers of the pagan world to persecute the children of the Church, Christ-worshipers (Apoc, 13,1-17). -When man, seduced by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, or pride, gave life. (1 lo. 2,16), he is enslaved by sin, he is also enslaved by the devil, who, making use of the same three lusts, will subject him more and more to sin, now turned into vice (Rom. 6, 13.19S; -7.14. Z3), and he will do with it as he pleases. And the worst thing will be that man, being a slave, will believe himself free, and,thinking of acting according to his will, he will execute the devil's. Thus Jesus said to the Jews: “You have the devil for your father, and you want to do your father's wishes. He was a murderer from the beginning and not stand in the truth because the truth is not in him, when he speaks a lie speaks of his own : for he is a liar and the father of lies "(Jn. 8:44)  As between means of God, always desirous of the salvation of man (1 Tim. 2.4), offers man to fight against the devil, the main one is the grace of Jesus Christ. The Lord, during his mortal life, fought against the spirit of evil, which instigated Judas to sell his Master (Jo. 13, 27), and the Jews to procure his death.

  But, looking at his passion, He Himself said: “Now is the judgment of this world, now the prince of this world will be thrown out, and I, if I am exalted from the earth, all will attract to me. This he said indicating of what death you must die”  (1 Jo. 3.8). That is why the evangelist himself says on his own:  "For this the Son of God appeared, to destroy the works of the devil." The devil's work is sin, and Christ destroys sin with his death (Hebr. 2:14). Some Fathers have described to us with exuberant eloquence this victory of Jesus Christ over the devil. There has been no lack of heterodox people who tried to get this eloquence out of their way to pervert the Catholic tradition, which Saint Thomas reduces to its just limits, interpreting the testimonies of the Fathers in the light of scriptural teaching and in accordance with the whole of the Catholic doctrine.

 III. FREEDOM FROM THE PENALTY OF SIN

  The third effect that Thomas attributes to the passion of Jesus Christ is that of having freed us from the penalty of sin. In Gen. 2.17, Yave Elohim intimidates Adam with the death penalty if he dares to eat the forbidden fruit, and, once the sin is committed, condemns him to sweat and work until he returns to the land from which he was taken, then, being dust, he must return to dust. That is why it is said in several passages of the sapiensales that God did not make death, that he entered the world because of sin, because of the envy of the devil (Sap. 1,13, 2,23). The destiny of souls is sheol, which in Scripture describes us as a dark place like the grave, sad as death for man (job. 10, 21). The most significant thing about the state of the souls in Sheol was that they would live deprived of conversation with God to the extent that they neither remember God nor God remembered them. That was the land of perpetual oblivion ("Is. 38,10). The personification of sheol, hell and death is frequent among the sacred authors. All this leads us to an idea of ​​death, which is sadder than that of the body, because this is the loss of temporal life, from which comes the conception of sheol as the deprivation of the goods that man enjoys here; but that is what Saint John calls the second death in Revelation (2.11; 21.8), the privation of God. Such death will be the penalty of the wicked, of the sinner who during his life did not know what it was to remember God; more for the pious soul, who rejoiced in him,that always brought him before his eyes, for this such it is not possible that death means a definitive separation from the Lord. Rather, the righteous lives in the assurance that Yave will not abandon his soul to sheol, but rather show him the ways of life and the eternal delights at his right hand.

  And this leads us to a new concept of life and death: “Whoever has me, says wisdom, finds life and will win the favor of Yave; but whoever loses me hurts himself, and whoever hates me loves death” (Prov. 8, 35). And more briefly:  "Before man are life and death: whatever each one wants, he will be given” (Eccl. 15,18). Life in sin leads to definitive separation from God; but life in justice leads to immortality, to the perpetual company of God. Hence what James tells us that sin begets (eternal) death. The prophet Ezekiel devotes a long chapter to declaring how life and death are linked to justice and sin (33. 10-33). In keeping with this, says Saint Paul "That the appetite of the flesh is death and that the appetite of the spirit is life and peace” (Rom. 8,6). God, I believe the living beings, who are a breath infused into man, a living soul, is the living God, he is the source of life. Saint John says of the Word that life is and that this life is the light of men. Jesus Christ himself declares this mystery of divine life more to us, when he says "that as the Father has life in himself, so he also gave the Son life in himself" (Jo. 5,20). And then:  "Just as my Father sent me and I live for my Father, so also he who eats me will live for me" (Jo.6,57), to eat Jesus is to come first to Him, and believe in Him. "I have come, he says in another place, so that they may have life, and have it in abundance" (Jo. 10,10). And this life, which is eternal life, consists in knowing God and his envoy, Jesus Christ.

  But in what way is Jesus Christ the beginning of life, which He receives from His Father? Saint Paul says, writing to Timothy: "Jesus Christ annihilated death and brought life and incorruption to light through the Gospel" (1 Tim. 1,10). The victim who offers himself on the altar dies instead of the offerer, who pays with her the life that he owes God for his sin. For Jesus Christ offered himself in atonement for our sins, died for them in our place, and we come to die in Him. With this we were translated from death to life. But this with your order. Offering himself in atonement for our sins, he freed us from death and earned us life, which is justice: he freed us from eternal death, which begets sin, and gained us the fullness of life, which is the life of God, eternal life.And this complete life of soul and body we attain through the resurrection, in which all Christian hope is based. In this way, Jesus Christ freed us from death, the penalty of sin, and earned us life in its Fullness, eternal life.

  ¿In what way can we make our own that which Christ deserved us? He Himself already told us in Saint John: going to Him, believing in Him. And Saint Paul will tell us that by faith in Him, in His passion and resurrection, and by receiving the rite of baptism, through which we join the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. With this we die to sin and rise to a new life, which is the life of Christ, being able to say with the Apostle: “I am crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, it is Christ who lives in me. And although at present I live in the flesh, I live in the faith of God and of Christ, who loved me and gave himself for me”(Gal. 2,2). And this life is the consummated eternal life.

IV. RECONCILIATION WITH GOD

  The reconciliation of man with God is the fourth effect of the passion of Jesus Christ. Anger is a human passion that induces man to revenge an evil that he believes he has received. As a punishment for evil, anger is also found in God. The sacred authors, who speak of God very humanly, often speak to us of the Lord's anger against sinners and that they provoke the wrath of God with their sins: (They provoked him with other people's gods, they irritated him with their abominations. They immolated demons, not gods, gods who did not know, new, little by little upstarts, whom his parents did not serve; And Yahweh violated and was irritated, disgusted by his sons and his daughters and said: I will hide my face from them, I will see what their end will be. Because it is a perverse generation, children without any fidelity. They have provoked me with non-gods, they have irritated me with vanities; I will provoke them as no-people and I will irritate them with foolish people. Since they have kindled the fire of my anger, it will burn to the depths of the abyss and will devour the earth with its fruits and I will scorch the foundations of the mountains (Deut. 32, 1 & 22). Because of our original sin we were already children of wrath, that is, objects of God's wrath (Conf. 2,3). And because of personal sins we fear God even more irritated (Rom. 1,18ff).  Well, since God's relations with mankind are thus, it pleased the Father that in Him (Christ) all fullness dwells and through Him reconcile with himself, pacifying by the blood of his cross all things, both on earth and on earth. from heaven, and to you, once strangers and enemies of heart for evil deeds, but now reconciled in the body of his flesh, to present holy and blameless before him (Col. 1,19-22). This is a proof of God's love for us, a love greater than his wrath, because if, being sinners, Christ died for us, even more so, now justified by His blood, we will be saved from wrath by Him. Because if, being enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more reconciled, we will already be saved in his life. V not only reconciled, but we rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we now receive reconciliation (Rom. 5.8-n). 

The opening of the gates of heaven.

 The last effect of Christ's passion for us was to open the doors of heaven for us. This is a metaphor, like so many others, that we find in the Scriptures. The gates of heaven, which is God, that is, the possession of God, in which eternal life is or eternal life consists, were closed to us because of original sin and closed to each one because of the personal sins that he commits. Sin begets death, and thus deprives us of eternal life. For once original and current sin, the sin of nature and personal sin, have been removed, the obstacle that prevented us from reaching God is removed. Jesus himself said that in his father's house there were many mansions and that he was going to prepare the place for us (Jo 14, 3). In the epistle to the Hebrews Jesus is presented to us as High Priest, entering into the virtue of self-sacrifice in the tabernacle of heaven. Well we haveBy virtue of the blood of Christ, firm confidence to enter the sanctuary that He opened for us, as a new and living way through the veil.

This article would be very long if we put all the effects of the passion of Christ, we will only mention them so that they can meditate on them in their hearts and extract from them the necessary fruits of such effects as they are: THE EXALTATION OF CHRIST, THE EXALTATION OF MARY.