“God does not wait until the guilty comes to be reconciled; he goes to meet them and reconciles them”

It is not man who goes to God with a compensatory gift, but God who comes to man, in order to give to him. He restores disturbed right on the initiative of his own power to love, by making unjust man just again, the dead living again, through his own creative mercy. His righteousness is grace; it is active righteousness, which sets crooked man right, that is, bends him straight, makes him correct. Here we stand before the twist that Christianity put into the history of religion.

The New Testament does not say that men conciliate God, as we really ought to expect, since, after all, it is they who have failed, not God. It says, on the contrary, that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor 5:19). This is truly something new, something unheard of—the starting point of Christian existence and the center of New Testament theology of the Cross: God does not wait until the guilty comes to be reconciled; he goes to meet them and reconciles them. Here we can see the true direction of the Incarnation, the Cross.

Accordingly, in the New Testament the Cross appears primarily as a movement from above to below. It stands there, not as the work of expiation that mankind offers to the wrathful God, but as the expression of that foolish love of God’s that gives itself way to the point of humiliation in order thus to save man; it is his approach to us, not the other way about.

Fr. J. Ratzinger “Introduction to Christianity”


HT: Amy Welborn and Pontifications