THE REDEEMER OF MAN, Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe and of history, wrote Pope, St. John Paul II in the Encyclical Redemptor Hominis.The act of redemption marked the high point of the history of man within God's loving plan. God the Father knew that we would not be able to live with Him again because of the original and personal sins, and the errors of our human intellect. So He sent us His Son, Jesus Christ, Who offered Himself to be our Redeemer. Through the Incarnation God gave us, the dimension that He intended man to have from his very beginning, His eternal love and mercy, with the full freedom, will and heart of God, and with the bounty that enables us to repeat with amazement the words of the Sacred Liturgy: "O happy fault... which gained us so great a Redeemer!" (Cf. Encyclical Redemptor Hominis)
Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of the world, is the One who penetrated in a unique unrepeatable way into the mystery of man and entered his "heart". The Son of the living God, in a certain way united Himself with each man. He worked with human hands, he thought with a human mind. He acted with a human will and with a human heart he loved, suffered and died to save us from death and our sins, and thus He become our reconciliation with the Father. The redemption of the world, this tremendous mystery of love in which creation is renewed, is the fullness of justice in a human Heart predestined from eternity in the Firstborn Son to be children of God, and called to grace and love. On the Cross on Calvary Jesus Christ – a Man, the Son of the Virgin Mary -"leaves" this world, and draws near again to humanity to His Father. This loving act, the Atonement, enables us to repent, confess our sins, to be forgiven, and become clean and pure, as Jesus is.
The Sacrament of Reconciliation, the Sacrament of the Passion, Cross, and Resurrection brings us strength and consolidation if we pronounce our sins personally with the whole depth of our conscience and with the whole of our sense of guilt and of trust in God, placing ourselves before God with a personal act of sorrow and the intention to amend and make satisfaction. It brings us to a more personal encounter with the crucified and forgiving Christ. Jesus Christ redeems and meets each one of us at the moment of confession and sorrow of sins bringing us, through His mercy and love, conversion and forgiveness. The sacrament of Penance is the means to satisfy us with the righteousness that comes from the Redeemer Himself.
Jesus was crucified and died, but after three days He was resurrected. He lives again! We too, in the mystery of the Redemption become newly created. If we wish to understand ourselves thoroughly, and not just in accordance with immediate, partial, often superficial, and even illusory standards and measures of our being, we must with unrest, uncertainty and even our weakness and sinfulness, with our life and death, draw near to Christ.
Truly, Jesus Christ is our Redeemer. He is the perfect example for all of us. He taught us how to treat one another with kindness. He taught us how to serve one another. He taught us how to become better. We won’t be able to live a perfect life as He did, but we can return to live in union with Jesus and His Father and the Holy Spirit by obeying the commandments and doing our best.
This Trinity in unity is perfectly expressed in the most perfect Sacrament that is the Eucharist. By celebrating and also partaking of the Eucharist we unite ourselves with Christ on earth and in heaven who intercedes for us with the Father but we always do so through the redeeming act of His Sacrifice, through which He has redeemed us. For by Christ's will there is in this Sacrament a continual renewing of the mystery of the Sacrifice of Himself that Christ offered to the Father on the altar of the Cross, a Sacrifice that the Father accepted, giving, in return for this total self-giving by His Son, who "became obedient unto death", His own paternal gift, a new immortal life in the resurrection. We need to follow Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, every day.