St. Thomas Aquinas offered seven reasons why it was fitting that Jesus suffered death on a cross.
Should our Lord have suffered death on the cross? St.
Thomas Aquinas asks the question in the Summa
Theologiae Part I, question 46, article 4. This question elicits two other
crucial questions: Who is Jesus? Why should he be crucified?
The testimony of the apostles, the disciples of Jesus, and the witnesses of his ministry understood Jesus is the Son of God. But this revelation as Son of the Father was not fully grasped until after the Resurrection when the connections between Jesus’ teaching and his ministry, his death and resurrection, began to make sense. The faith of the apostles, although fragile at first, was strengthened after the Resurrection: Christ is the Son of the living God.
However, the human encounter of the Son sent by God, Saviour of humanity, nailed to a cross, and the experience of Mary of having her son bleeding to death before her – the child who would “sit on the throne of his ancestor David,” required faith to the point of defying human understanding.
Witnessing crucifixion and death could hardly bring comfort to those who had hoped in “deliverance” and the hope of a true kingdom: a mother seeing her son on the cross, disciples, friends, witnessing Jesus being tortured, and finally dead, all feeling powerless before authorities who ruled, both religious (Jews) and secular (Romans). Only Mary, uncontaminated by sin, could have had interior knowledge beyond her son’s visibly cruel death.
The Crucifixion is a challenge for one’s faith, to reconcile God’s crucified Son with a merciful and omnipotent God. St. Thomas asks the question: Did Jesus have to die on the cross? Could God not have chosen some other means to save humanity?
St. Thomas provides seven reasons in his Respondeo to article 4 as to why it was a “fitting” means to save us that Jesus should suffer on the cross. The first reason St. Thomas offers is Jesus highlighting the value of virtue in the life of those who wish to be Christ’s disciples. St. Thomas draws from St. Augustine’s wisdom noting that while people might not fear death, they do fear the manner in which they will die. St. Thomas points out that given the manner in which Christ died “no kind of death should trouble an innocent man” thereby conveying the importance of courage.
The second reason that Christ’s death on the Cross is “fitting” relates to the atonement for the sin of our first parents, their disobedience, eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. St. Thomas says that being fastened to a “tree” was a fitting atonement for stealing from a prohibited tree and again drawing from Saint Augustine, “all that Adam lost, Christ found upon the cross.”
As for the third reason, St. Thomas draws from another Church Father, Christendom: Jesus’ death did not occur under a roof but high on a tree so that nature could be purified by the blood of Christ.
The sense of a cross lifted high upon the ground on a hill in reference to Golgotha also anticipates the Resurrection which Aquinas maintains is the fourth reason for the Crucifixion drawing from both St. John 12:32 and Chrysostom.
The fifth explanation for the Crucifixion as a “fitting” death is that death on the cross suits universal salvation. Aquinas draws from both Gregory of Nyssa and Chrysostom in reference to the cross pointing to the four extremities and the power and providence of Jesus who hung on it, with his hands outstretched reaching out to people from the “old” Law (Jews) and “gentiles” (non-Jews).
In the sixth reason Aquinas makes reference to St. Augustine’s writings and Ephesians 3:18: “May you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.” Hands outstretched convey Jesus’ good works; the height of the beam suggests longanimity, or forebearance; the beam moving upwards represents the head of the crucified Christ, because he is the one whom hopeful souls desire; the part of the tree in which the wood is hidden and fixed expresses the depth of the gratuity of grace.
Finally, the seventh reason that Aquinas give for this fitting death is that the wood of the cross provides a response to “many figures” of the Scriptures: the wood of the ark that saved the human race from the flood (Gn 6); Moses who overthrew the Pharaoh and divided the sea during the Exodus saving the people with a rod (Ex 7, 14); Moses dipped his rod into water changing it from bitter to sweet (Ex 15:22-25); with a touch of the rod a salvific spring poured from a rock (Nb 20:11); with arms outstretched and a rod in his hand, Moses overcame the forces of Amalek (Ex 17:8-9); and finally, the Law of God is kept in a wooden ark (Ex 25:10). St. Thomas maintains that this last reason signifies the steps which lead to the wood of the cross: ark, rod and covenant, fulfilled in the cross of salvation.
In the same article, in his reply to Objection 3, Aquinas closes the article by drawing from 2 Cor 5:21: “We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Father David Bellusci is a Dominican priest and assistant professor of philosophy at Catholic Pacific College in Langley.