One difficulty, however, rises out of
this mediatorship. Christ is both God and Man and he is Priest and Victim. How,
it may be asked, can “these things be”?
The answer will be understood if we
call that Christ is God, that he is Man, and that he is the God-Man. As God he
is the recipient of Sacrifice, because it is the Trinity which is worshipped
and propitiated in Sacrifice. Some theologians, indeed, regard the father, the
first Person, as the acceptor of the sacrifice of the Cross, and the words of
Trent, Christ “offered himself unto God the Father,” and certain texts in the
New Testament seem to support the view. But generally the expression used at
Trent is taken to be one of appropriation, a term explained in another essay,
which means shortly that certain actions common to all three Persons are
attributed by convenience and analogy to one Person above the others. The
expression in this context is, however, still more simply explained by the fact
that Christ is regarded there as the God-Man, “the one mediator of God and men,
the Man Jesus Christ.” However mysterious and above reason this conjunction of
natures in one Person must ever remain, it does allow for the possibility of God
using manhood as a propitiatory gift, endowing it with his own personal merit,
and so combining the representative and the pleasing and holy. If Christ had
been the Word and no Man, then he could not have been a Mediator, for there
would have been nothing between himself and the Father save a distinction of
personality. If he had been but a man, again mediation in the strict sense would
have been impossible, because the gulf between sinful man and God would not
have been bridged. The mysterious conjunction of two natures does, however,
resolve the difficulty; and as long as the mediation is assigned to One who
does not lose anything of the Godhead by being Man nor anything of his Manhood
by being God, and we can understand how Christ though God can offer sacrifice to
God. (M. C. D’Arcy, “Christ, Priest, and Redeemer,” in The Teaching of the
Catholic Church: A Summary of Catholic Doctrine, ed. George D. Smith, 2
vols. [New York: The MacMillan Company, 1927, 1961], 1:485)
