Why Jesus’ Passion?

Passion in Gethsemane

“Then he said to them, ‘My soul is very sorrowful, even to death’; …And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, ‘My Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.’”

Matthew 26:38–39

Every Christian confesses that Christ died for our sins. The harder question — the one that quietly divides Christians — is why. Why was a death required at all? What did the cross actually accomplish, and by what logic? The answer one gives shapes one’s whole picture of God: of his justice, his mercy, and the love between the Father and the Son.

Jehovah’s Witnesses answer that Jesus’ death was a corresponding ransom — the exact legal price of the “perfect human life” that Adam lost — and they insist the redeemer had to be a perfect man, not God. Much of Protestantism answers instead that Christ bore our punishment in our place — and objects that the Catholic account, by speaking of love rather than penalty, has blunted the very thing that saves. Both cases are set out in their own words in the Protestant & Watchtower View panel, and they have almost nothing in common: one says the Catholic answer is too soft, the other that it is far too large.

The Catholic tradition, given its deepest form by St. Thomas Aquinas, answers that Christ rendered satisfaction by an offering of love of infinite worth. The Catholic View panel makes that case and then takes the two objections in turn — including the points on which the Reformed are simply right, and the narrower place where the disagreement actually lies.

Let’s set these three answers side by side — the ransom, the penalty, and the satisfaction of love — and ask …

  • Did the cross balance a ledger, or absorb a punishment, or was it the free self-gift of God himself, a love that more than repaired the offense of the whole human race?

I invite your engagement with me on these questions. You may leave comments below, but please be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

Protestant & Watchtower View

Both objections here are about the same event and have almost nothing else in common. The Protestant objection is that the Catholic account is too soft — that it blunts the wrath of God against sin by making the cross an offering of love rather than the bearing of a penalty. The Watchtower objection is that it is too large: the redeemer needed to be a perfect man and nothing more, and a divine Christ would have overpaid.

The Protestant Objection

Christ bore the punishment, and that is the gospel. This is the heart of it. On the Reformed account the Father laid on the Son the penalty sinners had earned: “the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all,” and “it was the will of the LORD to bruise him” (Isa. 53:6, 10). God “made him to be sin who knew no sin” (2 Cor. 5:21); He “became a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13); and from the cross He cried out that God had forsaken Him (Matt. 27:46). An account that speaks of satisfaction through charity and calls the penal note “subordinate” has, on this view, quietly removed the thing that saves.1

“It is finished” — so why is anything still owed? Christ said the work was complete (John 19:30), and Hebrews says that by a single offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified (Heb. 10:14). Yet Rome adds the Mass, purgatory, penance, indulgences, and a doctrine of redemptive suffering built partly on Paul’s saying that he fills up in his flesh “what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Col. 1:24). If nothing is lacking, nothing can be filled up.2

And for whom did He die? Here the Reformed press a point that divides them from Catholics and from other Protestants alike. If Christ died for every person without exception, then His death did not actually save anyone; it made salvation possible and left the outcome to us. The Good Shepherd “lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11), and He prays not for the world but for those given Him (John 17:9). An atonement that fails to atone, on this reading, is no atonement.3

He is risen — take Him down from the cross. The objection is partly devotional and none the weaker for it. Protestants keep the cross bare because Christ is no longer on it, and they mistrust a piety that dwells on the physical wounds — the crucifix, the stations, the relics of the Passion, and above all the language of Mary’s share in the suffering at Calvary. Whatever is meant by it, they say, it puts a creature beside the Redeemer at the one moment where He must stand alone.4

The Watchtower Objection

Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that Jesus’ death was a “corresponding ransom” — the exact legal equivalent of what the first man, Adam, forfeited by his sin. This ransom is the heart of their understanding of salvation, and it is tied directly to their denial that Christ is God: the redeemer, they insist, had to be a perfect man and nothing more.

Adam forfeited perfect human life. When God created Adam, he gave him “perfect human life,” with the prospect of living forever. By his deliberate sin, Adam lost this — for himself and for all his descendants, who inherit sin and death (Rom. 5:12). A price was needed to buy back what was lost.5

Only a corresponding perfect human life could redeem it. Justice, on this view, required an exact equivalence: “another perfect human life — a corresponding ransom — had to be paid,” of “the same value as the life that Adam lost” (1 Tim. 2:6, NWT). Jesus, born a perfect man and remaining sinless, possessed exactly this, and by laying down his perfect human life he paid the price — “nothing more, nothing less.”6

A “God-man” could not balance the scales. Because the ransom must correspond exactly to Adam, the Watchtower concludes that the redeemer could not be divine: “A spirit creature or a ‘God-man’ would not balance the scales of justice. Only a perfect human … could offer a corresponding ransom.” The ransom is “not a physical exchange, but a legal transaction.”7

The ransom is paid to God, and makes Jesus mankind’s “father.” The price is paid “to God” (Ps. 49:7), whose justice held the debt. By purchasing the human family, Jesus is said to become its new life-giver, a “replacement for Adam,” even mankind’s “Eternal Father” (Isa. 9:6).8

Endnotes
  1. On penal substitution, see John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.16.10–12, on Christ bearing the judgment due to us; the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), VIII.4–5; and Isaiah 53:4–6, 10; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Galatians 3:13. ↩
  2. On the sufficiency of the one offering, Hebrews 7:27; 9:25–28; 10:10–14, and the Thirty-Nine Articles, XXXI. The companion pages Is Purgatory Scriptural? and Literal Body and Blood? take up the Mass and purgatory in their own right. ↩
  3. On definite atonement, see the Canons of Dort (1619), Second Head of Doctrine. This is a Reformed position rather than a Protestant one: Lutherans and Arminians hold with the Catholic Church that Christ died for all, citing 1 Timothy 2:6 and 1 John 2:2. ↩
  4. On images and the Passion, the Thirty-Nine Articles, XXII, rejecting “the Romish Doctrine concerning … Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques.” The Communion of Saints page treats images at greater length, and The Blessed Virgin treats her place at the cross. ↩
  5. On Adam’s forfeiture of perfect human life, see What Does the Bible Really Teach? ch. 5 (“The Ransom — God’s Greatest Gift”) and the Insight on the Scriptures article “Ransom” (jw.org / Watchtower Online Library), citing Romans 5:12; 1 Corinthians 15:22. ↩
  6. On the “corresponding ransom” of equal value, see The Watchtower, “A Corresponding Ransom for All” and “Christ’s Ransom — God’s Way of Salvation” (Watchtower Online Library): “the loss of a perfect human life would require the payment of a perfect human life — nothing more, nothing less” (1 Tim. 2:6, NWT). ↩
  7. “A spirit creature or a ‘God-man’ would not balance the scales of justice. Only a perfect human, someone not under the Adamic death sentence, could offer ‘a corresponding ransom’” (The Watchtower, “A Corresponding Ransom for All,” Watchtower Online Library). The ransom is “not a physical exchange, but a legal transaction” (Draw Close to Jehovah, ch. on the ransom, jw.org). ↩
  8. On the ransom paid “to God” (Ps. 49:7) and Jesus as “a replacement for Adam” and mankind’s “Eternal Father” (Isa. 9:6), see The Watchtower, “Christ’s Ransom — God’s Way of Salvation” (Watchtower Online Library) and Draw Close to Jehovah (jw.org). ↩

Catholic View

The Catholic Church holds that Christ’s death saves us, that it is rightly called a ransom, and that the price is paid to God and not to Satan. So far the two accounts agree. They part on the size of the debt. The Watchtower measures the offense by what Adam lost; the Church measures it by the One who was offended — and once that is seen, the redeemer the Watchtower rules out is precisely the redeemer the problem requires.

The Debt Is Larger Than the Ledger

Following Anselm, Aquinas begins not with punishment but with offense. Sin ruptures a relationship of justice with God and incurs a debt. And the gravity of an offense is measured not only by the act but by the dignity of the one offended: an insult to a peasant and the same insult to a king are not equal acts. Because God is infinite, an offense against Him carries a weight no finite creature, drawing on its own resources, can repay.1

That is the impasse Anselm framed: humanity ought to make satisfaction but cannot; God can but does not owe it. And it is exactly where the corresponding-ransom account fails. If the offense is against the infinite God, a merely finite perfect human life — even a sinless man’s — is not large enough to repair it. A ledger sized to Adam cannot measure an offense sized to God. The Redeemer therefore had to be what the Watchtower most denies: human, and so a fitting one to pay; and divine, and so capable of an offering of infinite worth. The “God-man” said to unbalance the scales is the only thing that could balance them.

“Corresponding” Is Not in the Text

The whole doctrine of exact equivalence rests on one phrase, and the phrase is a translation choice. At 1 Timothy 2:6 the Greek is antilytron — a ransom, a redemption price. The prefix carries the ordinary sense of “in place of,” which is why the standard versions read simply “a ransom for all.” The New World Translation renders it “a corresponding ransom,” and on that adjective the entire doctrine of arithmetical equivalence is built. The lexicons do not supply it. A doctrine resting on a word the text does not contain is not a doctrine drawn from the text.2

A second text is pressed the same way. Because Christ is said to become a “replacement for Adam” and so mankind’s life-giver, Isaiah 9:6 is cited, where the child is called “Everlasting Father.” But that phrase sits in a string of titles — “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” — and the whole string is a set of divine names given to a child yet to be born. Read as the Watchtower reads it, the verse proves rather more than intended: it is evidence for the deity of the one it names, not for His being a second Adam. Of Adam’s sin passing to all his descendants (Rom. 5:12) there is no dispute at all; the Church has always taught it, and Romans 5 goes on to draw the very contrast between the one man’s trespass and the one Man’s free gift on which the Catholic account rests.

Satisfaction Through Love, Not a Quantity of Pain

Aquinas then shifts the center of gravity in a way that changes everything. A cruder satisfaction-theory weighs the sheer magnitude of suffering needed to match an infinite offense, as though God were tallying pain. Aquinas asks instead about the love with which it is borne. Christ’s Passion satisfies superabundantly, he says, “on account of the exceeding charity from which He suffered” — He “offered to God more than was required to compensate for the offense of the whole human race.”3

A small act done from great love can outweigh a great act done grudgingly, and the cross is the maximal expression of love: “greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). It is love that reconciles persons, and love that the Father receives. For the Watchtower the cross balances a ledger. For Aquinas it offers a love of infinite worth — worth a merely human Christ could not possess.

Not the Punishment of an Innocent Man

This also separates the Catholic account from the harsher forms of penal substitution, in which the Father inflicts on the Son the punishment sinners had earned. That picture makes God punish the innocent, which Scripture elsewhere calls an abomination, and divides the Trinity, setting a wrathful Father against a loving Son who rescues us from Him.

Aquinas dissolves both by attending to one point: the Passion was a free act of the Son’s love, not a punishment imposed against His will. God the Father delivered up Christ “not by compelling Him to suffer against His will, but by inspiring Him with the will to suffer for us.” The handing over of Romans 8:32 is by eternal will and by the infusion of charity into Christ’s human heart — not by venting retribution on an unwilling victim. Christ takes on the consequences of sin, real suffering and real death, and in bearing them turns them into the instrument of redemption. The penal note is real but subordinate. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16).4

Fitting, Not Forced

Both the ledger and the harsher penal scheme speak as though God were compelled — as though justice were a law above God to which even He must submit, so that He had to exact a death. Aquinas denies it. God is omnipotent, and remitting the debt another way involves no contradiction. Sin is ultimately against God alone — “against thee, thee only, have I sinned” (Ps. 51:4) — so forgiving it freely would be mercy, not injustice, no more unjust than a man forgiving a friend without demanding payment. And since the dignity of Christ’s person is infinite, any act of His could have redeemed us.5

Why the cross, then? Not because God was cornered, but because it was the most fitting way — the way that showed His justice and mercy at once, gave the supreme example of obedience, merited grace for us, and overcame death by dying. Love acts in freedom, never under compulsion. The cross is not a price God was forced to pay. It is the masterpiece of His freedom.

Ransom Is One Word Among Several

The deepest flaw in the corresponding-ransom account is that it seizes a single word and makes it the whole. Aquinas presents the one saving work under several interlocking modes: merit, since Christ as head wins grace for His members; satisfaction, the loving self-offering that more than repairs the debt; sacrifice, the true offering the temple rites prefigured; redemption, the ransom that liberates; and the efficient cause of grace, since Christ’s humanity is the instrument of His divinity.6

“Ransom” is itself a metaphor — Jesus handed over no literal coin. The Catholic account keeps the word with its full biblical weight, and agrees that the price is paid to God, in whose justice the debt is held (Ps. 49:7). What it refuses is the flattening of a rich metaphor into a commercial equivalence between Adam and his replacement. This is not the enemy of “ransom.” It is its rescue from a reading too small to be true.

What the Reformed Objection Gets Right, and Where It Overreaches

The penal note is real, and no Catholic should deny it. Isaiah says the chastisement of our peace was upon Him and the Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all; Paul says God made Him to be sin for us and that He became a curse for us. The Church affirms every word of that. What she declines is the further step — that the Father, in wrath, punished the Son as a guilty party in our place. Punishment presupposes guilt, and Christ had none; God cannot regard the innocent as guilty without regarding falsely. The cry from the cross is the opening line of Psalm 22, a psalm that ends in vindication, prayed aloud by a man who had just promised paradise to a thief.7

So the disagreement is narrower than it sounds. Both sides hold that Christ bore what our sins deserved and that we go free because He did. The question is whether the Father was venting retribution on Him or accepting an offering from Him — and Scripture says the Son laid His life down of Himself, that no one took it from Him (John 10:18).

“It is finished” is the Catholic premise. Nothing is added to Calvary and nothing could be. What the Church teaches is that the finished work is applied — that a redemption accomplished once must still reach each person, through faith and baptism and the sacraments, across twenty centuries. Applying a payment is not supplementing it. On Colossians 1:24, Paul plainly is not saying the atonement fell short; the same letter calls Christ’s work complete. What is lacking is the Church’s own share in her Head’s sufferings — the members filling out what belongs to the body, not the body repairing what the Head left undone.

And He died for all. The narrowing of the atonement to the elect is the one point where the Reformed stand apart from Lutherans and Arminians as much as from Rome, and Scripture is not on its side: Christ “gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Tim. 2:6), and is the propitiation for our sins “and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). That some are not saved is a fact about reception, not about the sufficiency of what was offered. A gift refused was still given.

As for the crucifix — Paul preached Christ crucified (1 Cor. 1:23) and resolved to know nothing else among the Corinthians (1 Cor. 2:2), which is a strange programme for a man embarrassed by the image. The empty cross and the corpus say two true things, and the Church has never denied the resurrection by depicting the death. On Mary at the cross the Church claims far less than the objection supposes: she is not a redeemer and cannot be, and what is said of her share in the Passion is said of every Christian who suffers with Christ (Rom. 8:17), of her most fully because she stood there.

The Reply in Brief

The corresponding ransom is an arithmetic answer to a personal problem. It measures sin by what Adam forfeited rather than by the God against whom it was committed, and so arrives at a redeemer sized to Adam — a perfect man and nothing more. But an offense against the infinite cannot be repaired by a finite offering, however spotless, and the very phrase the doctrine turns on is not in the Greek.

What the cross is, on the Catholic account, is not a transaction but a self-gift: the eternal Son, freely and out of love, offering to the Father what no creature could offer, and doing so as one of us. That love is what satisfies, and it is why the Redeemer had to be both God and man. The Watchtower’s scales cannot balance, because the weight on one side is infinite — and only God could lift it.

This is the short answer. The full treatment adds the Protestant penal-substitution account and what is true in it, the older ransom-to-Satan theory and why the tradition rejected it, Aquinas on how a universal cause is applied to individuals, the difference between imputed and infused righteousness and what Trent actually said, how baptism and the Eucharist join us to the Passion, and full documentation for everything asserted here. It is available as a Word document at the end of this page.

Endnotes
  1. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo I.11–13, 20–25, on sin as a debt of honor and on the measure of an offense by the dignity of the one offended; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 1, a. 2, and III, q. 48, a. 2. The impasse — that man ought but cannot, God can but does not owe — is Anselm’s formulation. ↩
  2. 1 Timothy 2:6, Greek antilytron. The standard lexicons (Bauer–Danker–Arndt–Gingrich; Liddell–Scott) give “ransom” or “redemption price”; the prefix anti- carries the ordinary substitutionary sense of “in place of,” not the arithmetical sense of “exactly equivalent to.” The rendering “a corresponding ransom” is peculiar to the New World Translation; see the companion page on it. ↩
  3. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 48, a. 2: the Passion satisfies superabundantly “on account of the exceeding charity from which He suffered,” together with the dignity of the life laid down; “He who suffered … offered to God more than was required to compensate for the offense of the whole human race.” ↩
  4. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 47, a. 3: God the Father delivered up Christ “not by compelling Him to suffer against His will, but by inspiring Him with the will to suffer for us.” On the whole Trinity willing the one work of salvation, see III, q. 47, aa. 2–3, with Romans 8:32; John 3:16; Romans 5:8. ↩
  5. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 46, a. 2, on the Passion as not absolutely necessary: “it was possible for God to deliver mankind otherwise than by the Passion of Christ”; with Psalm 51:4 on sin as against God alone. On the fittingness of the cross, III, q. 46, a. 3. ↩
  6. On the several modes of the one saving work — merit, satisfaction, sacrifice, redemption, and efficient causality — see Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, qq. 48–49. On the ransom being paid to divine justice rather than to the devil, III, q. 48, a. 4, against the older ransom-to-Satan theory. ↩
  7. On why the Church declines the stronger penal formulation, see Catechism of the Catholic Church §§599–618, especially 603: “Jesus did not experience reprobation as if he himself had sinned.” On the cry of dereliction as the opening of Psalm 22, §603 again, with Matthew 27:46 and Psalm 22:1, 22–31. On Colossians 1:24, §§1508 and 618. On the extent of the atonement, §§605 and 616, citing 1 Timothy 2:6 and 1 John 2:2. ↩

Summary

All Christians agree that Christ died for our sins; they disagree about how a death accomplishes it. The Watchtower answers with a “corresponding ransom,” an exact legal equivalence for what Adam forfeited — which requires that the redeemer be a perfect man and nothing more. Much of Protestantism answers that the Father laid our punishment on the Son, and objects that the Catholic account is too soft. The Catholic answer is satisfaction through love, and it turns on a single question: how large is the debt?

The debt is measured by the One offended, not by what Adam lost. The gravity of an offense depends on the dignity of the one offended: an insult to a peasant and the same insult to a king are not equal acts. Sin against an infinite God therefore incurs a debt no finite creature can repay from its own resources. A ledger sized to Adam cannot measure an offense sized to God.

So the “God-man” is not the problem but the solution. Anselm framed the impasse exactly: humanity ought to make satisfaction but cannot; God can but does not owe it. The Redeemer had to be human, and so a fitting one to pay, and divine, and so capable of an offering of infinite worth. The very thing the Watchtower rules out is the only thing that answers the difficulty it has raised.

“Corresponding” is not in the Greek. The whole doctrine of exact equivalence rests on one adjective at 1 Timothy 2:6. The word is antilytron — a ransom, a redemption price — and the standard versions read simply “a ransom for all.” The lexicons supply no “corresponding.” A doctrine resting on a word the text does not contain is not a doctrine drawn from the text.

What satisfies is love, not a quantity of pain. Aquinas holds that the Passion satisfies superabundantly “on account of the exceeding charity from which He suffered.” A small act done from great love outweighs a great act done grudgingly, and the cross is love at its maximum: “greater love has no man than this” (John 15:13). For the Watchtower the cross balances a ledger; for the Church it offers a love of infinite worth.

The Father did not punish an innocent man. God delivered up Christ “not by compelling Him to suffer against His will, but by inspiring Him with the will to suffer for us.” The Passion is the Son’s free act of love, not retribution vented on an unwilling victim. Christ bears the consequences of sin and turns them into the instrument of redemption. The penal note is real but subordinate.

God was not compelled. Justice is not a law above God to which even He must submit. Remitting the debt otherwise involves no contradiction; sin is against God alone (Ps. 51:4), so forgiving it freely would be mercy, not injustice; and since Christ’s dignity is infinite, any act of His could have redeemed us. The cross is not a price God was cornered into paying. It is the masterpiece of His freedom.

The penal note is real; the wrath is the disputed part. The Church affirms with the Reformed that Christ bore what our sins deserved and that we go free because He did. What she declines is that the Father punished Him as guilty — punishment presupposes guilt, and He had none. And the cry of dereliction is the opening line of Psalm 22, a psalm that ends in vindication, prayed by a man who had just promised paradise to a thief.

“It is finished” is the Catholic premise. Nothing is added to Calvary. What the Church teaches is that a finished work must still be applied, across twenty centuries and to each person — and applying a payment is not supplementing it. He died for all, too: a ransom “for all” (1 Tim. 2:6), and for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:2). A gift refused was still given.

“Ransom” is one word among several. The one saving work is merit, satisfaction, sacrifice, redemption, and the efficient cause of grace. Ransom is itself a metaphor — Jesus handed over no literal coin — and the Church agrees the price is paid to God, in whose justice the debt is held (Ps. 49:7). What she refuses is the flattening of that metaphor into a commercial equivalence between Adam and his replacement.

In short: the corresponding ransom is an arithmetic answer to a personal problem. The cross is not a transaction but a self-gift — the eternal Son offering to the Father, as one of us, what no creature could offer. That God did not have to save us by the cross is the very measure of the love that did. “He loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20).

For a more complete essay on this topic, download Why the Cross? (.docx)