But the final and decisive reason for the passion [Christ's] lay in man's sinfulness.  In His body Christ had to pay the price for the sin of men by submitting to death.  "What the law could not do, in that the flesh rendered it powerless, God sending His own Son, with a flesh like to that of sin, and in view of sin, has condemned sin in the flesh" (Rom., 8:3). The flesh of Christ was like to the flesh of sinful man precisely because it was not yet within the sanctuary; it was unglorified, subject to death; and death, of the body as well as of the soul, is the consequence of sin.  The obedience of Christ's will had to be expressed in His flesh, accepting death, the penalty of sin, if men were to be released from sin.  The moment on Calvary was the supreme moment only because then the full implications of interior sacrifice in the context of sinful humanity were accepted and fulfilled.  When Christ's body is raised from death mankind has the certainty that death has been overcome, that the power of sin has been broken.  And yet, as St. Thomas does not fail to insist, man's sin could have been absolved in other ways.  Without violating the law of justice, God could have condoned man's offence by an act of mercy.  In any event His mercy stands behind Christ's reparation for it was He who sent His Son, and this implies a basic condonation of sin.  The true sense of Christ's sufferings, the need for His death, are to be sought in man.  It was because God respects the dignity of the creature whom He has made to His own image that He sent His Son to die as man.  It was man who was overcome by Satan and man, if he is to bear the responsibilities of his freedom, must pay in full the consequence of his fault.  Because Christ suffered man can claim that humanity has met the debt of justice incurred by sin, an offence against God.

-- excerpted from Colman O'Neill's Meeting Christ in the Sacraments (p.34)

My bottom line: Thus, God is not a wrathful God who demands the death of His own Son in order to appease His own justice!

"In truth - one thing is certain: there exists a night into whose solitude no voice reaches; there is a door through which we can only walk alone - the door of death.  In the last analysis all the fear in the world is the fear of this loneliness.  From this point of view it is possible to understand why the Old Testament has only one word for hell and death, the word scheol; in the last resort it regards both as identical.  Death is absolute loneliness.  But the loneliness into which love can no longer reach is hell."

-- Ratzinger's Introduction, p. 229

Thus, hell is already here for some of us!
Not a place, geographically speaking, but the isolation
of the categorical refusal to let oneself be penetrated by Love,
the rejection of Love's desire to establish communion and to link up
with oneself, and the determination to be self-sufficient. This loneliness
should lead to suicide as a logical conclusion.

"Excess is God's trademark in His creation; as the [Early Church] Fathers put it, 'God does not reckon His gifts by the measure'.  At the same time excess is also the real foundation and form of the history of salvation, which in the last analysis is nothing other than the truly breathtaking fact that God, in an incredible outpouring of Himself, expends not only a universe but His own self in order to lead man, a speck of dust, to salvation.  So excess or superfluity - let us repeat - is the real definition or mark of the history of salvation.  The purely calculating mind will always find it absurd that for man God Himself should be expended.  Only the love can understand the folly of a love to which prodigality is a law and excess alone is sufficient.  Yet if it is true that the creation lives from excess or superfluity, that man is a being for whom excess is necessity, how can we wonder that revelation is the superfluous and for that very reason the necessary, the divine, the love in which the meaning of the universe is fulfilled?"

-- Ratzinger's Intro., pp. 197-8.

I can go to bed tonight, knowing that my puny existence is not outside of the embrace of God's excess love -- me and all my petty concerns!  Deo gratias!

"So Jesus did not call Himself unequivocally the Messiah (Christ); the man who gave Him this name was Pilate, who for his part associated himself with the accusation of the Jews by yielding to this accusation and proclaiming Jesus on the cross, in an execution notice drawn up in all the international languages of the day, as the executed king (=Messiah, Christus) of the Jews.  This execution notice, the death sentence of history, became with paradoxical unity the 'confession of faith', the real starting-point and rooting-point of the Christian faith, which holds Jesus to be the Christ: as the crucified criminal this Jesus is the Christ, the king.  His crucifixion is His coronation; His coronation or kingship is His surrender of Himself to men, the identification of word, mission, and existence in the yielding up of this very existence.  His existence is thus His word.  He is word because He is love.  From the cross faith understands in increasing measure that this Jesus did not just do or say something; that in Him message and person are identical, that He always already is what He says.  John needed only to draw the final straightforward inference: if that is so -- and this is the christological basis of his gospel -- then this Jesus Christ is 'word'; but a person who not only has words but is his word and his word is the logos (the 'Word', meaning, mind) itself; that person has always existed and will always exist; He is the ground on which the world stands -- if we ever meet such a person, then he is the meaning which sustains us all and by which we are all sustained."  

-- Ratzinger's Intro., pp 151-2

I think this is the most difficult passage of the entire book, which is among the most profound books I have ever come across!  Jesus as Word=Jesus as Love=Jesus as Original Meaning of the entire created world=Jesus as the Eternal One!  It requires much mediation, reflections, prayers, and fasting to grasp the profundity of what the pope wrote here!

"For the time being, let us note that alongside the union of the God of faith and the God of the philosophers, which we recognize in the first article as the basic assumption and structural form of the Christian faith, a second, no less decisive alliance appears, namely that of the logos and sarx, of word and flesh, of faith and history.  The historical man Jesus is the Son of God, and the Son of God is the man Jesus.  God comes to pass for man through man, nay, even more concretely, through the man in whom the quintessence of humanity appears and who for that very reason is at the same time God Himself."


--  Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity, p. 142. 

"At each crisis in the growth of our human affections there should be a corresponding discovery of a new aspect of our friendship for Christ."


"At each temptation . . . realize that this is normal.  At this time ask God to help you decide and know that Jesus asks you simply to choose Him, once more, as the single object of your love."


-- by Father Voillaume in "Au Coeur des masses"

"Thus today we often see in the faces of young people a remarkable bitterness, a resignation that is far removed from the enthusiasm of youthful ventures into the unknown.  The deepest root of this sorrow is the lack of any great hope and the unattainability of any great love: everything one can hope for is known, and all love becomes the disappointment of finiteness in a world whose monstrous surrogates are only a pitiful disguise for profound despair.  And in this way the truth becomes ever more tangible that the sorrow of this world leads to death: it is only flirting with death, the ghastly business of playing with power and violence, that is still exciting enough to create an appearance of satisfaction.  "If you eat it you must die" -- for a long time this has no longer been just a saying from mythology (Gen. 3:3)."

-- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's "To Look On Christ", published by Crossroad, 1991, pp. 69-70.

Isn't it true that we keep bumping up against our limitations, our finiteness, our finitude, even as we yearn for eternity in the very enjoyment of earthly delights?  This feeling of constant frustration over our inability to ever achieve lasting joy and love and happiness in this life should drive us all to despair, if it had not been for our faith and our hope, which has been guaranteed by Christ's resurrection.