What is the Significance of Christ to Humanity?

[JosephSharon]

What is the significance of Christ coming to earth and being resurrected to humanity? Were we unable to go to heaven before this? Please give me an answer in plain English - no generic “he died for our sins.”

Thank You

 

[Tantum_ergo]

We were not able to go to heaven before Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.

Not one person, no matter how personally ‘righteous’ he or she was could ‘earn’ heaven by that ‘righteousness.’ It was Christ’s willingness to take upon Himself the guilt of humanity and to save us so that by our cooperation with Him and our acceptance of this that we now **can **(but are by no means guaranteed to) be able to go to heaven.

 

[JosephSharon]

What about the humans that existed before the resurrection of Christ?

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I very much appreciate your answer, but how is it that you know that?

 

[Tantum_ergo]

Before Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection, the wicked still went to hell (just as they would today) but the righteous, who would (just as they do today) have accepted Christ’s salvation and thus come into heaven, were in a place (or state of mind) which some call the limbo of the fathers. This was not hell, nor was it heaven. It was not a place of torment but it lacked the Beatific Vision and thus was not hell. And remember, once people die they are no longer ‘limited’ to time as we know it. People use the terminology of time because they are accustomed to do so, but Scripture tells us “in the wink of an eye the trumpet shall sound and we shall be changed” so even for a person who died a million years before Christ lived (such as Adam and Eve), on their death, their personal ‘experience’ of judgment did not exist in a ‘time.’ They did not wait in some heavenly ‘waiting room’ for 1 million years, with gradually more and more people pouring in day after day!!!

We know from the Creed that Christ descended 'to the dead" on his death. That was, He went to those righteous and He ‘released’ them. We know from Scripture that many graves of the people ‘were opened’ on Christ’s death and resurrection, and that
people 'saw those who had died rise up." That was the righteous who had died prior to Christ’s death/resurrection and who now were able to enter heaven. And we also know from Scripture that Christ promised the good thief “you will be with me in Paradise.”

I know this from Scripture (as above), from tradition (the oral teachings of which St. Paul spoke, many of which are seen in later prayers and in works of the early Church Fathers) and from the teachings of the Church through The Holy Spirit (through whom, as Scripture says, we are to be 'led to all Truth") and once again, from Scripture, in knowing that “The Church is the pillar and bulwark of Truth.”

 

[Tantum_ergo]

And here, this is from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, starting at paragraph 1024:
This perfect life with the Most Holy Trinity - this communion of life and love with the Trinity, with the Virgin Mary, the angels and all the blessed - is called “heaven.” Heaven is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness.

[1025](javascriptpenWindow(‘cr/1025.htm’) To live in heaven is “to be with Christ.” The elect live "in Christ,"600 but they retain, or rather find, their true identity, their own name.601
For life is to be with Christ; where Christ is, there is life, there is the kingdom.602

[1026](javascriptpenWindow(‘cr/1026.htm’) By his death and Resurrection, Jesus Christ has “opened” heaven to us. The life of the blessed consists in the full and perfect possession of the fruits of the redemption accomplished by Christ. He makes partners in his heavenly glorification those who have believed in him and remained faithful to his will. Heaven is the blessed community of all who are perfectly incorporated into Christ.
[1027](javascriptpenWindow(‘cr/1027.htm’) This mystery of blessed communion with God and all who are in Christ is beyond all understanding and description. Scripture speaks of it in images: life, light, peace, wedding feast, wine of the kingdom, the Father’s house, the heavenly Jerusalem, paradise: "no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him."603 [1028](javascriptpenWindow(‘cr/1028.htm’) Because of his transcendence, God cannot be seen as he is, unless he himself opens up his mystery to man’s immediate contemplation and gives him the capacity for it. The Church calls this contemplation of God in his heavenly glory “the beatific vision”: