Mercy for Murderers in Scripture

Part 4 of my series on the death penalty in the Catholic Weekly.

Some varieties of Christianity see in the Crucifixion a kind of weird divine child abuse. In that telling, God the Father wanted to slaughter the human race, but then God the Son distracted him by offering himself as the target for the divine sadism and this somehow made God the Father happy and he forgot his desire to destroy us in his orgy of cruelty against his own Son.

But in Catholic orthodoxy, this bizarre picture is rejected. Sinners, said Trent, were the authors of Christ’s Passion. God, in Christ, offered himself to us with complete freedom and love and we, with complete freedom and hate, chose to do to him what we did. As Ezekiel saw, God does not vindictively seek the human blood of Jesus to slake his thirst for vengeance against man. Rather, in the incarnation, God pours out his own blood for us and accepts our appetite for vengeance against him, swallowing it all up in the infinite abyss of his mercy. When Jesus cried, “I thirst” from the cross it was thirst for the love of those who were murdering him, not for vengeance against them. He sought their redemption, not their destruction. And he endured the cruelest and most unjust application of the death penalty in the history of the world to achieve it.

More here.