At the beginning of time, humanity was given a simple and holy calling: to live, to love, to flourish, and to multiply before the Lord. In the first marriage, man and woman were invited into communion with God and with one another. Yet through the free will of humanity, sin entered the world when Adam and Eve ate from the tree from which they had been commanded not to eat. That first act of disobedience opened the door to the judgment we had deserved, and from that moment sin has riddled humanity. The atrocities committed by human hands across history, from genocide to abuse, hatred, cruelty, and evils too dark to fully name, reveal how deep the wound of sin truly is. Yet even in the face of such evil, the mercy of God remains. Still, if God is just, then sin cannot simply be ignored. There must be judgment, for without judgment there can be no justice, and without justice there can be no just God. 

Before we sin, the Lord appears to us as commandment: “thou shalt not.” After we sin, the Lord appears to us as Savior. The enemy tempts, accuses, and destroys. God warns, convicts, forgives, and redeems. Christ Himself taught that the judgment of this world was coming, and the enemy, delighted at the sight of Calvary, did not understand what was about to happen. What looked like defeat was in truth the divine victory of mercy through justice. The powers of darkness saw blood, shame, mockery, and death. They did not see that the spotless Lamb was offering Himself willingly to save the world. 

From the beginning, God’s chosen people offered sacrifice because sin carries a debt, and because holiness requires atonement. The sacrificial system pointed forward to something greater. It had to be a blameless and spotless lamb. Scripture even foreshadowed that not one of its bones should be broken, a detail fulfilled in Christ’s Passion. What the old covenant anticipated, Jesus fulfilled perfectly. He is not merely another offering among many. He is the final and perfect sacrifice. 

This is why the prophecy of Isaiah is so staggering. Long before the Crucifixion, Isaiah described the suffering servant with remarkable clarity: rejected, pierced, crushed, bearing our guilt, and offering his life for others. Isaiah 53 is one of the clearest prophetic windows into the Passion of Jesus Christ. The prophet writes of one who would be “spurned and avoided,” one who would bear our pain and sufferings, and one upon whom “the punishment that makes us whole” would fall. This is not vague symbolism. It is a prophecy of redemptive suffering, and in Christ it is fulfilled with blazing clarity. 

Jesus’ suffering unfolded in stages, and each stage reveals both the brutality of sin and the depth of divine love. First came His agony in the garden, where He accepted the cup the Father had set before Him. Then came betrayal, arrest, abandonment, and false accusation. He was scourged. He was crowned with thorns. He was mocked as king by the very creatures He had made. He was struck, humiliated, condemned though innocent, forced to carry the Cross, stripped, nailed to the wood, lifted up, pierced, and buried. The Gospels do not present this as accidental tragedy. They present it as the willing self offering of the Son of God for the salvation of the world. Pilate himself repeatedly found no guilt in Him, underscoring Christ’s innocence in the midst of His condemnation. 

The suffering of Christ was physical, emotional, spiritual, and cosmic. He suffered in His body through scourging, thorns, nails, thirst, and crucifixion. He suffered in His heart through betrayal by Judas, denial by Peter, desertion by His friends, and the hatred of the crowds. He suffered in His soul as the sinless one who bore the weight of a fallen world. Yet at every stage, He remained the innocent one. As Saint Peter writes, “He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth,” and yet “He himself bore our sins in his body upon the cross.” The innocent suffered for the guilty so that the guilty could be made righteous before God. 

The imagery is almost unbearable in its depth. Humanity first sinned through a tree, taking what was forbidden. Then Christ, the Creator, entered His own creation to redeem it. The One who made the trees, the One through whom all things were created, was nailed to a cross made from the wood of the world He spoke into existence. And in the imagery you used so powerfully, the carpenter was nailed to a cross. The hands that shaped creation were pierced by His creatures. The Lord of glory submitted Himself to the instruments of death fashioned from the world He made. This is the Passion of the mercy and forgiving love of God. 

The worst sin ever committed by humanity is the murder of the perfect and blameless only begotten Triune Son of the living God. Yet the best thing ever to happen to humanity is the forgiveness and redemption brought through Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. In Saint Paul’s words in his Letter to the Colossians, Christ is “the image of the invisible God.” The One humanity rejected was not merely a teacher, prophet, or martyr. He was, and is, the visible image of the invisible God, the eternal Son through whom all things were made. 

And yet, even this greatest evil became, by the sovereign wisdom of God, the place where mercy triumphed. Christ’s death paid our debts. His willing sacrifice fulfilled the perfect justice of God. He put His relationship with us above every sin and failure in our relationship with Him. He did not excuse sin. He absorbed its cost. He did not deny justice. He satisfied it. He did not abandon sinners. He died for them. That is why the Cross is not merely a symbol of suffering. It is the throne of divine love, where justice and mercy meet in perfect holiness. Isaiah foresaw it. The Passover foreshadowed it. The Gospel reveals it. 

Then came burial. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus laid the body of Jesus in the tomb. The silence of Holy Saturday stands as a witness to the reality of His death. Christ truly died. He was not appearing to die. He was not nearly dead. He entered death fully, and in doing so entered the deepest consequence of human sin. Yet death was not the end of the story. 

On the third day, Jesus rose from the dead. This is not a poetic conclusion. It is the center of Christian hope. Christ was handed over, crucified, buried, and raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. His resurrection is our redemption. His death paid our debts, and His resurrection declares the victory of that sacrifice. The tomb is empty because the sacrifice was accepted. The Resurrection is the vindication of the Son, the defeat of death, the overthrow of the enemy, and the promise that those who belong to Christ will live in Him. 

This is why Saint Paul can say, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38 to 39). The Passion proves that. The Cross proves that. The empty tomb proves that. Nothing can separate us from God’s love because Christ entered the full horror of sin and death in order to bring us back to the Father. 

As Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen so often emphasized in his preaching on Christ, the Passion is not merely a historical event to be observed from a distance. It is the revelation of divine love confronting the rebellion of man. In Christ crucified, we see both the horror of sin and the greater glory of mercy. We see judgment, and we see forgiveness. We see the price of evil, and we see the immeasurable love of God. 

So this is the Passion of the Lord: the justice of God satisfied, the mercy of God poured out, the Lamb of God slain, the debt of sin paid, the enemy overthrown, and love victorious. The tree of death became the tree of life. The carpenter was nailed to a cross. The blameless Son was condemned so the guilty might be forgiven. The one whom humanity rejected is the very one through whom humanity may be redeemed. And on the third day, He rose, so that all who belong to Him may know that sin does not have the final word, death does not have the final word, and failure does not have the final word. Jesus Christ does. Love is greater than all pain and wrongs.    

References

The Holy Bible, New American Bible Revised Edition. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Isaiah 53. 

The Holy Bible, New American Bible Revised Edition. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. John 19. 

The Holy Bible, New American Bible Revised Edition. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Matthew 27. 

The Holy Bible, New American Bible Revised Edition. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Luke 23. 

The Holy Bible, New American Bible Revised Edition. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Luke 24. 

The Holy Bible, New American Bible Revised Edition. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Romans 8. 

The Holy Bible, New American Bible Revised Edition. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Colossians 1. 

The Holy Bible, New American Bible Revised Edition. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. 1 Corinthians 15. 

The Holy Bible, New American Bible Revised Edition. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. 1 Peter 2. 

The Holy Bible, New American Bible Revised Edition. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Exodus 12. 

The Holy Bible, New American Bible Revised Edition. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Psalm 34. 

Vatican News. “Fulton Sheen to be Beatified in St. Louis on 24 September 2026.” March 25, 2026.