The good of Good Friday 7: brought low and lifted up

The last of Thomas Aquinas’s ten ways in which the incarnation of God worked for “the restoration of the human race” is

in order to free man from the thralldom of sin, which, as Augustine says, “ought to be done in such a way that the devil should be overcome by the justice of the man Jesus Christ,” and this was done by Christ satisfying for us. Now a mere man could not have satisfied for the whole human race, and God was not bound to satisfy; hence it behooved Jesus Christ to be both God and man. Hence Pope Leo says: “Weakness is assumed by strength, lowliness by majesty, mortality by eternity, in order that one and the same Mediator of God and men might die in one and rise in the other—for this was our fitting remedy. Unless He was God, He would not have brought a remedy; and unless He was man, He would not have set an example.”

     If you study medieval Christian theology even just a little bit, you will come away remembering a man named Anselm who asked in the title of one of his writings “Why the God-man?” (Cur deus homo). The question is about the incarnation — the coming of God as the man Jesus — and the answer is the reconciliation of humans and God, what Anselm called “satisfaction” and we might call “the atonement.” Humanity was obligated to bear the necessary penalty for sin, and only God could bear it, so one who is both God and a human had to do it. The incarnation was necessitated by the atonement. By quoting Augustine and Pope Leo I, Thomas shows that that logic, which we have already seen in the fourth of his answers to how the incarnation of God worked for our restoration (here), went back before Anselm to Thomas could very comfortably quote as authoritative teachers.
     Jesus, the God-man, was brought down to the lowest place for a moment to “taste death for everyone” and for that was “crowned with glory and honor” (Hebrews 2:9). He was brought lower than any of us, to the most ignominious death.

Therefore God has lifted him up high and honored him with the name higher than any name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee of those in heaven, on earth, and under the earth should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:8-10)

     We remember that moment when Jesus was brought low, and then raised up, on Easter weekend (even in quarantine, as we are this year). On Holy Saturday we sing “Low in the grave he lay,” and it is right that we sing it in anticipation of singing “Up from the grave he arose!” We sing those lines or similar words every year to remember those events, and in a smaller way we do the same every week when we meet on Sunday mornings. All that gives us repeated opportunities to grasp what we can of that set of events and thus make our vision of them new again. What we bring to our minds again and again is the pivot on which the whole experience of humanity swings. All our sense-making comes down to that incarnation, that death, and the resurrection to glory.

• The good of Good Friday
  1: introduction
  2: faith and hope
  3: and love
  4: doing and being
  5: bodies
  6: humility
  7: brought low and lifted up
• Augustine lived 354-430
  Pope Leo I lived ca. 400-461
  Anselm of Canterbury lived ca. 1033-1109
  Thomas Aquinas lived 1225-1274