How could God allow his only Son to die?

[twin2]

I am a practicing Catholic, deeply rooted in my faith and have been married for 37 years to a non-catholic (unbaptized) wonderful man. I attend daily mass and yet today after we listened to a speech on being “saved”, he asked me a question that I couldn’t answer in a way that I should be able to:

“Why would a loving father, allow for his only son to be put to death on a cross for us?” I gave him answers about what it has done for us as christian people but he just kept asking “but why”? “How did it make this world a better place?”

I want him to know desperately what he is missing in his life but I’m not very good at explaining things.

thankyou so much.

 

[Fr.Vincent_Serpa]

Hi,

Well first of all, we aren’t dealing with the typical human father-son relationship with which we are all familiar. We are dealing with a Father who is God and a Son who is God. Together with the Holy Spirit, they have always existed and are completely equal to each other. Jesus was completely in agreement with the Father in becoming man and suffering and dying as He did.

In John 10:17-18 He says: “The Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me; I lay it down of my own free will,.”

The key to making sense out of all this lies in the realization that God is not just a bigger version of us. God is God and beyond our ability to fathom. So when God speaks to us, we do well to listen while knowing that we’re not going to grasp all of it. This isn’t to say that we know nothing of God, therefore. We know that God is unlimited. He has told us that He loves us. So His love for us is unlimited. But this remains an abstraction for us because we have no experience of anything that is unlimited. In becoming man and choosing to really suffer, he taps into our own experience. We have a handle on suffering. In suffering to the point of dying He gives all that a human can give. That He is God and is doing this blows us away. He’s God; He doesn’t ever have to suffer. Why would He share the life of His creatures and allow them to torture Him to the point of putting Him to death?

This bring us back to that key I mentioned earlier. God is not merely a bigger version of us. He is God and so loving in this way must matter to Him in a way that is far more profound than any understanding of love we could ever come up with on our own. Not only that, His death on the cross does not exhaust His love for us. It’s simply all we can handle. Such realization reduces us to silence.

The eternal moment in which He died transcends time, covering everyone who has ever lived or will live. And yet that moment remains in time as well—as the Eucharist. This is why Mass is so special.

Fr. Vincent Serpa, O.P.