The Jewish and Christian conviction about salvation is remarkable precisely in that salvation has a history. Salvation is a fully public event that unfolds in historical time before the watching eyes of the nations. Salvation is not a matter of pulling a few individual survivors from the wreckage of creation after the Fall, but is about the re-creation of a new heaven and a new earth.

It is not power, but love that redeems us! This is God’s sign: he himself is love. How often we wish that God would make show himself stronger, that he would strike decisively, defeating evil and creating a better world. All ideologies of power justify themselves in exactly this way, they justify the destruction of whatever would stand in the way of progress and the liberation of humanity. We suffer on account of God’s patience. And yet, we need his patience. God, who became a lamb, tells us that the world is saved by the Crucified One, not by those who crucified him. The world is redeemed by the patience of God. It is destroyed by the impatience of man.

Redemption is a reopening. If you wish, it is truly the center of the event of our divinization, as I have tried to say by relating the Eucharist to the Cross. I believe it is necessary to do more. Christ truly gives himself to us, and he gives us what is his, because he has taken what is ours - sin - upon himself.

Sin is living as if there were no God, no grace of God, no creation to remember or kingdom to hope for, no forgiveness to redeem the past or eternal life to focus the future, no faith, no hope, no love. It is living outside the narrative of God - without regard to the creation, the covenant with Israel, the revelation in Christ, the existence of the church, the consummation on the last day - and making one’s own narrative instead.

Just as God so loved the world that he completely handed over his Son for its sake, so too the one whom God has loved will want to save himself only in conjunction with those who have been created with him, and he will not reject the share of penitential suffering that has been given him for the sake of the whole. He will do so in Christian hope, the hope for salvation of all men, which is permitted to Christians alone.

We have said that in Jesus’ filial communion with the Father, his human soul is also taken up into the act of praying. He who sees Jesus sees the Father (cf. Jn 14:9). The disciple who walks with Jesus is thus caught up with him into communion with God. And that is what redemption means: this stepping beyond the limits of human nature, which had been there as a possibility and an expectation in man, God’s image and likeness, since the moment of creation.

That the Redeemer is solidary with the dead, or, better, with this death which makes of the dead, for the first time, dead human beings in all reality - this is the final consequence of the redemptive mission he has received from the Father, His being with the dead is an existence at the utmost pitch of obedience, and because the One thus obedient is the dead Christ it constitutes the ‘obedience of a corpse’ (the phrase is Francis of Assisi’s) of a theologically unique kind.