The confession that the Son makes on behalf of humanity
In this word of the Lord lies His entire mission. He hangs on the cross to win forgiveness for sinners from the Father. With this word, which is He Himself and which He formulates in this short sentence, He connects people with the Father as the Redeemer. He does not pronounce it on the Mount of Olives, at the beginning of the Passion, but only now, when the cross is raised between the other two crosses, when the path of suffering has stopped, when the cross is at work.
This action means suffering for the Lord, this power signifies helplessness for Him. The Son calls to the Father; He still knows of His presence and knows His own mission so perfectly that He intervenes with a word, with a cry, but does not point out in any way what He is experiencing. He utters a plea. In it, He does not express an opinion, but a perfect knowledge that He has acquired about people during thirty-three years of life on earth. He lived among them, shared their everyday life, and knows them exactly as they are.
Throughout that time, He also had the opportunity to observe them in the love He has for them and to assess their value from this love. He knows who they are. They are not like Him. They are beings who constantly need help and encouragement, who would perish without God's mercy, beings entirely dependent on God's mercy. They are not even strong enough to cry out for this mercy, knowing too little to recognize its necessity. They forget God. They forget the Son who lives with them. They do not forget themselves. But the image they have formed of themselves is a distorted image of sin. Their true view of themselves has slipped away from them. And in this state, they continue to act, but no longer in accordance with their knowledge and actions, but somehow without will, without awareness, without responsibility. They do things that they cannot evaluate, that they do simply for the act, before the Son, against the Son. And He knows that they cannot be called to full responsibility, and He has drawn the conclusion: He Himself bears the responsibility. That He bears it does not mean that He leaves people to themselves; on the contrary, He hands them over to the Father. His forgiveness. This is the forgiveness for which He prays to the Father in His first prayer on the cross.
It is a great confession that the Son makes on behalf of humanity. He takes on all the responsibility, which means He bears all the guilt. In excusing people, in covering their guilt before the Father, guilt becomes apparent on Him. What they have truly done cannot remain hidden from the Father. But the Father will not see the result as human guilt, but as the Son's suffering. Of course, from this suffering, the Father will be able to measure the greatness of guilt; at various stages of the Passion, individual sins can even be identified. But when sins are revealed, they will never be perceived other than together with suffering, with the Son's will to excuse the people, to cleanse them of their guilt. In this lies the Son's confession.
However, it is not enough for the Son that the Father sees His suffering and that the responsibility that the people had has been placed upon Him; He wants the Father to accept people as innocent, and this innocence will be created only by extending the cross and shaping it in the sacramental confession, in which their share in the sacramental grace is also given to the people. Their share in the Son’s confession, which He has already freed from guilt before the Father by taking it upon Himself. On the day of His resurrection, the Lord will definitively confer the sacrament. However, He does not want the forgiveness of sins to be postponed in such a way that it becomes dependent on the responsible deeds of people. Therefore, He simultaneously takes on their guilt and their responsibility to bear it on the cross. And when He later returns a part of His responsibility to them in the sacrament, He does so out of grace that has already arisen from the cross. That we can confess, that we can confess our guilt before God, is already the grace of the cross. That is why the Son on the cross represents sinners as ignorant beings who cannot be called to responsibility, for whom judgment would be powerless because they would not yet understand the verdict at all. They do not know the weight of their guilt; they do not even know what they are doing.
Taken from the book: Words on the Cross
Author: Adrienne von Speyr
Published by: KNA
