You see, then, my brethren, how voluntary was the mission and death of our Lord; if an instance can be imagined of voluntary suffering, it is this. He came to die when He need not have died; He died to satisfy for what might have been pardoned without satisfaction; He paid a price which need not have been asked, nay, which needed to be accepted when paid. It may be said with truth, that, rigorously speaking, one being can never, by his own suffering, simply discharge the debt of another's sin. Accordingly, He died, not in order to exert a peremptory claim on the Divine justice, if I may so speak,—as if He were bargaining in the market-place, or pursuing a plea in a court of law,—but in a more loving, generous, munificent way, did He shed that blood, which was worth ten thousand lives of men, worth more than the blood of all the sons of Adam poured out together, in accordance with His Father's will, who, for wise reasons unrevealed, exacted it as the condition of their pardon.

Nor was this all;—one drop of His blood had been sufficient to satisfy for our sins; He might have offered His circumcision as an atonement, and it would have been sufficient; one moment of His agony of blood had been sufficient, one stroke of the scourge might have wrought a sufficient satisfaction. But neither circumcision, agony, nor scourging was our redemption, because He did not offer them as such. The price He paid was nothing short of the whole treasure of His blood, poured forth to the last drop from His veins and sacred heart. He shed His whole life for us; He left Himself empty of His all. He left His throne on high; He gave up His home on earth; He parted with His Mother, He gave His strength and His toil, He gave His body and soul, He offered up His passion, His crucifixion, and His death that man should not be bought for nothing. This is what the apostle intimates in saying that we are "bought with a great price"; and the prophet, while he declares that "with the Lord there is mercy, and with Him a copious" or "plenteous redemption".

This is what I wished to draw out distinctly, my brethren, for your devout meditation. We might have been pardoned without the humiliation of the Eternal Word; again, we might have been redeemed by one single drop of His blood; but still on earth He came, and a death He died, a death of inconceivable suffering; and all this He did as a free offering to His Father, not as forcing His acceptance of it. From beginning to the end it was in the highest sense a voluntary work; and this is what is so overpowering to the mind in the thought of it. It is as if He delighted in having to suffer; as if He wished to show all creatures, what would otherwise have seemed impossible, that the Creator could practise, in the midst of His heavenly blessedness, the virtues of a creature, self-abasement and humility. It is, as if He wished, all-glorious as He was from all eternity, as a sort of addition (if we may so speak) to His perfections, to submit to a creature's condition in its most afflictive form. It is, if we may use human language, a prodigality of charity, or that heroic love of toil and hardship, which is poorly shadowed out in the romantic defenders of the innocent or the oppressed, whom we read of in history or in fable, who have gone about the earth, nobly exposing themselves to peril for any who asked their aid.