Jesus, Mercy Incarnate

Justice can never be served by punishing the inno- cent.... If [the Son of] God then deliberately takes on himself the suffering which is my due for the evil I have done, he is not satisfying Justice; he is perverting it. His conduct may be considered admirable from a different point of view, but not from that of Justice. 7 (a) ASuperabundant Satisfaction for Sin One can see the problem God was facing. Our loving God did not want to exact retribution for sin upon us poor sinners; if He simply gave us all what we deserve for our sins, that would have satisfied His strict justice, but not His love for us. On the other hand, God could not suffer the retribution we deserve in our place – that would have satisfied His love for us, but not the demands of justice. Therefore, God had to find another way to make a just sat- isfaction or compensation for our sins in order to set us free. As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, a person can be said to make satisfaction for an offence when he offers to the offended party an adequate compensation of some kind, something which that per- son accepts with a delight matching or outweighing his original displeasure at being offended. 8 In other words, a gift offered in compensation for a wrong done – as an act of contrition and repa- ration – this too “makes up” for sin; it is a proper satisfaction of the demands of divine justice. In fact, that is precisely what our Savior did for us. 9 In compensation for our misspent lives, the divine Son offered, in His human nature, a whole human life, from cradle to grave, utterly dedicated in obedient love to our heavenly Father. 10 That perfect offering in itself was compensation enough for our sins, because the one who made this human offering on our behalf was the divine Son in the flesh, and all the actions of the divine Son are of infinite value to His eternal Father. Then Christ went one step further for us. He not only offered His perfect human life unto death to the Father, in compensation for our sins; He also offered that life unto a cruel death – indeed, the most bitter and cruel death that the twisted imaginations of men could 45 Saint Faustina and Devotion to the Passion of Jesus Christ