Oggi vorrei meditare il fatto che il Dio incarnato fu crocifisso per noi. Insomma, pagò con la sua vita per noi.
Un atto del genere ha senso o è pura assurdità?
Prima considerazione:
… What has gone wrong is that we humans have lived bad human lives. A proper offering would be a perfect human life which might well end in a death by execution, which we can offer to God as our reparation. Maybe one human life, however perfect, would not equate in quantity of goodness to the badness of
so many human lives. But it is up to the wronged person to deem when a sufficient reparation has been made; and one truly perfect life would surely be a proper amount of reparation for God to deem that reparation (and penance)
enough had been made…
Seconda considerazione:
… if a wrongdoer has no means to make reparation, a well-wisher may often provide him with the means; the wrongdoer can then choose whether or not to
use that means for that purpose. Suppose that I owe you some service; for example, suppose that I have promised to clean your house and that you have already paid me to do this. Suppose also that I have spent the money but
omitted to clean the house at the promised time, and that I have now had an accident which makes me unable to clean the house. Clearly I owe you repentance and apology; but I must also try to get someone else to clean the house. Even if you don’t badly need the house to be cleaned, you may think it important that I should be involved in getting it cleaned; it matters that I should take responsibility for what I have omitted to do. So you may encourage a third person to offer to me to clean the house on my behalf. If I accept this offer, I am involved in providing the reparation; and when the house is cleared, you can forgive me…I suggest that the Christian claim that Jesus saved us from our sins may be best understood in that way: God could help us to make atonement for our sins and those of our ancestors. By becoming incarnate and living a perfect human life in Jesus, God provided an act of reparation of which we can avail ourselves. God was both the wronged person (the victim of our wrongdoing) and also the one who, thinking it so important that we should take our wrongdoing seriously, made available the reparation for us to offer back to him…
Ma per qualcuno è già assurdo il concetto di “peccato originale” da cui si parte: perché mai dovremmo pagare per il comportamento del nostro progenitore?
Strana meraviglia visto che lo studio della genetica ci rende familiari dinamiche analoghe che accettiamo senza battere ciglio senza etichettarle come “assurde”:
… for example, if boys smoke a lot before puberty, that affects their genes in such a way that their children tend to be more obese than they would be otherwise. See New Scientist, 7 January 2006. Obesity clearly makes certain good actions harder to do…
Si potrebbe dire che lo accettiamo come fatto senza ritenerlo “giusto”. Che dire allora quando riscontriamo che…
… even the English law requires that before you can claim what you inherit from your dead parents you must pay their debts. To inherit a debt is not to inherit guilt. For we were not the agents of our ancestors’ wrongdoing, but we have inherited a responsibility to make atonement for this debt of ‘original sin’, as far as we can—perhaps by making some reparation…
