By Clement Harrold

March 19, 2026

You’ll sometimes hear Christians say that Jesus “bore” or “took on” the weight of the world’s sin during His Passion. Even the Catechism seems to endorse this kind of language:

After agreeing to baptize him along with the sinners, John the Baptist looked at Jesus and pointed him out as the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” By doing so, he reveals that Jesus is at the same time the suffering Servant who silently allows himself to be led to the slaughter and who bears the sin of the multitudes, and also the Paschal Lamb, the symbol of Israel's redemption at the first Passover. (608)

 

The language of sin-bearing is also found in Sacred Scripture. One of the most famous examples comes from Isaiah 53, which prophetically points forward to Christ in His Passion:

He was despised and rejected by men;

   a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;

and as one from whom men hide their faces

   he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Surely he has borne our griefs

   and carried our sorrows;

yet we esteemed him stricken,

   smitten by God, and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our transgressions,

   he was bruised for our iniquities;

upon him was the chastisement that made us whole,

   and with his stripes we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray;

   we have turned every one to his own way;

and the Lord has laid on him

   the iniquity of us all. (Isa 53:3-6)

Isaiah’s moving description is echoed in various places in the New Testament:  

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Cor 5:21)

 

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed be every one who hangs on a tree” (Gal 3:13)

 

so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him (Heb 9:28)

 

He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. (1 Pet 2:24)

How, then, do we make sense of these passages, and what exactly is the Catechism saying when it talks about Jesus bearing the sins of the multitudes? 

Penal Substitution: A Flawed Approach

One way of explaining the Scripture passages that we’ve listed is to adopt the theory of “penal substitution” favored by many evangelical Protestants.  

This theory was defended by Reformers like Luther and Calvin. It asserts that in His Passion Jesus became legally guilty for all the world’s sins. On this account, the crucifixion is about God the Father pouring out His wrath on the Son, because divine wrath is what our sins deserve.  

In His justice, God ensures that no evil deed goes unpunished. But in His mercy, God provides His only Son to bear this punishment in our place. Calvin even goes so far as to suggest that in His Passion Jesus experienced the pains of the damned, since damnation is the just punishment for humanity’s sin.

While penal substitution is appealing for its simplicity, it remains theologically untenable.  

The most foundational problem for the theory is that it would be gravely unjust for God to punish an innocent man—in fact, the most innocent man of all—in place of the guilty.

But penal substitution also struggles to explain a number of other elements.  

For example, if Jesus has already borne the punishment for all sins for all time, then why do we still suffer and die?

Moreover, if Jesus were truly supposed to endure the punishment that sinners deserve, wouldn’t that require Him to experience the pains of hell eternally, and not just for a few hours on Calvary?  

More to the point, how does it make any sense to speak of the God-man experiencing the pain of damnation? After all, the worst pain of hell is the despair that comes from knowing you are eternally separated from God. But it is metaphysically incoherent to speak of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity experiencing this kind of despair.

Satisfaction, Not Punishment  

Penal substitution ultimately fails as a convincing method for explaining how Christ bears the world’s sin.  

So what other explanations might be available?

Here we need to turn to some of the great thinkers in our tradition, such as St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas, who propose that Christ’s saving work on the Cross is ultimately one of satisfaction, not punishment.

Satisfaction is the act of making amends for some wrong deed that we or someone we love has committed.

If a teenager recklessly crashes into the neighbor’s car, then the neighbor may seek to have the teenager punished under the law. But it may also happen that the neighbor accepts some form of satisfaction instead. Perhaps the teenager offers to mow the neighbor’s lawn for the rest of the summer, in this way making amends for the wrong he has committed.

It is also important to note that the neighbor could even accept satisfaction from someone other than the teenager.

Perhaps the teenager is a troubled individual who expresses no contrition for his careless behavior, and yet his parents are heartbroken, and they immediately approach the neighbor with tears, flowers, and a handwritten card.

In such a case, the neighbor might look at the reaction of the parents and conclude that satisfaction has been offered for the teenager’s behavior, even if the teenager himself remains uncontrite.

Now for Anselm and Aquinas, it doesn’t make sense to say that Jesus is being punished by the Father when He hangs upon the Cross. Instead, they argue, Jesus’s redemptive work is about offering satisfaction for the sins of all mankind.

At the same time, nobody can deny that Jesus experienced suffering and death, which are the punishments brought on humanity as a result of Adam’s sin.

To understand how Jesus could share in our punishment without actually being punished by the Father, it’s helpful to consider an analogy.  

We might imagine a kingdom where a group of the king’s subjects have committed a serious crime. As a punishment, the king exiles these subjects and condemns them to work in the mines, where they must remain until they can unearth enough precious metals to buy back their freedom.

But there’s a problem: the subjects are incapable of reaching their desired goal.

They don’t understand the techniques of mining; their tools are inadequate; and they lack the wherewithal to apply themselves to the task and so earn their ransom.

Hence, as things stand, there is no prospect of the exiled subjects ever regaining their freedom.  

But now let us suppose that the king really loves these subjects, in spite of the crimes they have committed. For this reason the king devises a plan together with his son, the prince of the realm.

Unlike the exiled subjects, the prince is a master miner. He knows where to look for the precious stones, and he has the energy and tools to be successful in the task. And so the king agrees to send his son to join the subjects in exile so that he can win back their freedom for them.  

In this analogy, the prince is sharing in his subjects’ punishment, but he is not himself being punished by the king.

The prince is perfectly innocent, and in fact, it’s this innocence that makes his willingness to go into the dark, cold, dirty mines all the more admirable. The prince has never done anything to deserve these kinds of conditions, but he goes there anyway because both he and his father long to see their subjects restored to their former dignity.

They long to see their subjects restored, but they also wish to see proper amends being made for the crimes that those subjects committed.

This is why the prince enters the mine to do what the subjects couldn’t do: he unearths the precious stones and presents those stones to his father as a work of satisfaction on behalf of everyone stuck in the mine. And the king is so gratified by this selfless act of charity that he agrees to liberate any and all of the exiles who are willing to embrace the savior prince who descended into the darkest cavern in order to redeem them.

What Wondrous Love is This

We’ve seen that Jesus saves fallen humanity through an act of satisfaction, not punishment.

But what does that satisfaction involve, exactly?

To return to our analogy, what are the “precious stones” that Jesus offers in reparation for the sins of the world? It’s an important question, because it isn’t immediately obvious why the violent, bloody death of the Son should be in any way pleasing to the Father.

Here Aquinas offers us guidance.

He clarifies that it is not the sufferings of Christ per se that provide satisfaction for the sins of the world. Rather, the satisfaction comes about through the infinite love and obedience that are occasioned by Christ’s sufferings:

He properly atones for an offense who offers something which the offended one loves equally, or even more than he detested the offense. But by suffering out of love and obedience, Christ gave more to God than was required to compensate for the offense of the whole human race. First of all, because of the exceeding charity from which He suffered; secondly, on account of the dignity of His life which He laid down in atonement, for it was the life of one who was God and man; thirdly, on account of the extent of the Passion, and the greatness of the grief endured . . . And therefore Christ’s Passion was not only a sufficient but a superabundant atonement for the sins of the human race; according to 1 John 2:2: “He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world.” (ST III.48.2)

Thus, for Aquinas, it is neither the punishment nor the pain that saves the world.

While these things play a part in God’s plan of redemption, in the final analysis it is love which saves the world.

This in turn helps us to make sense of Aquinas’s cryptic comment about “the greatness of the grief endured.”

What grief is Aquinas referring to?

Doubtless Jesus had many reasons for grief during His Passion, whether it be the torment in His body or the anguish in His soul after being condemned by His people and abandoned by His friends.  

And yet, a close reading of Aquinas suggests that he is gesturing at something deeper.  

The greatest cause of Christ’s grief on the Cross was the weight of the world’s sin, which He freely chose to bear. Yet He did this not by becoming guilty of those sins, but by grieving over them.

Aquinas explains:

But in very truth some sadness is praiseworthy, as Augustine proves—namely, when it flows from holy love, as, for instance, when a man is saddened over his own or others’ sins. Furthermore, it is employed as a useful means of satisfying for sins, according to the saying of the Apostle (2 Cor 7:10): “The sorrow that is according to God worketh penance, steadfast unto salvation.” And so to atone for the sins of all men, Christ accepted sadness, the greatest in absolute quantity, yet not exceeding the rule of reason. (ST III.46.6.ad2)

Christ grieved not only over the loss of His own bodily life, but also over the sins of all others. And this grief in Christ surpassed all grief of every contrite heart, both because it flowed from a greater wisdom and charity, by which the pang of contrition is intensified, and because He grieved at the one time for all sins, according to Isaiah 53:4: “Surely He hath carried our sorrows.” (ST III.46.6.ad4)

Aquinas informs us that Christ grieved at the one time for all sins. The great twentieth-century theologian Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange sheds additional light on this rather staggering claim:

Only a great contemplative can penetrate deeply into the richness of these sober words [of Aquinas]. We catch a suggestion of what they contain by thinking of those who have offered themselves as victims for some sinner and have sometimes had to suffer terribly for his sins, in order to detest them in his stead and with the intention of obtaining for him the grace of Conversion. Christ had to suffer not only for a few sinners, but for thousands and thousands of all peoples and generations, and for all their sins at the same time. . . .  

Our Lord, therefore, suffered chiefly because of men’s sins, and His suffering surpassed that of all contrite hearts, because of the superiority of His knowledge and love. He saw incomparably better than we can the gravity of mortal sin and Hе knew the number of men’s offenses. Immeasurably more than we, He loved both Him whom sin offends, God His Father, and our own souls, which die of sin. (The Love of God and the Cross of Jesus, Vol I, ch 4, art 2)

It is little wonder, then, that Jesus declares in the lead up to His Passion, “Now is my soul troubled” (John 12:27). Indeed, it seems true to say that it is the horrifying reality of human sin that is the primary source of the Savior’s anguish in Gethsemane:

And he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and knelt down and prayed, “Father, if thou art willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him. And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down upon the ground. (Luke 22:41-44)

It is sometimes pointed out that there have been Christian martyrs who have gone to their deaths cheerfully and at peace, without ever exhibiting the fear that Christ exhibits in the garden.

And yet, none of these martyrs had to endure anything like what Christ had to endure.

None of them had to endure the monumental burden of human iniquity, which led even the God-man to tremble with dread: “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Matt 26:38).

In a profound sermon titled “Mental Sufferings of Our Lord in His Passion,” St. John Henry Newman meditated on the distress it caused Christ to come face to face with the full horror of human sin:

And now, my brethren, what was it He had to bear, when He thus opened upon His soul the torrent of this predestinated pain? Alas! He had to bear what is well known to us, what is familiar to us, but what to Him was woe unutterable. He had to bear that which is so easy a thing to us, so natural, so welcome, that we cannot conceive of it as of a great endurance, but which to Him had the scent and the poison of death—He had, my dear brethren, to bear the weight of sin; He had to bear your sins; He had to bear the sins of the whole world. . . . Sin could not touch His Divine Majesty; but it could assail Him in that way in which He allowed Himself to be assailed, that is, through the medium of His humanity. And in the issue, in the death of God incarnate, you are but taught, my brethren, what sin is in itself, and what it was which then was falling, in its hour and in its strength, upon His human nature, when He allowed that nature to be so filled with horror and dismay at the very anticipation.

Beginning in Gethsemane and culminating on the Cross, Jesus confronted “the power of darkness” (Luke 22:53) head-on. As true man, Jesus could feel sorrow and pain. As true God, He could call to mind all sins past, present, and future.

Not only that, but He could and did readily perceive what we so easily miss. He perceived sin for what it truly is; He saw it in all its stark obscenity, injustice, and cruelty.

To be sure, at the apex of His spirit, Jesus never lost sight of the Father, and this remained for Him the source of perfect peace and joy. And yet, in the hour of His Passion, Jesus freely chose to embrace in the lower parts of His soul the most profound sorrow which our sins demand. It was a sorrow greater than any the world has ever known, yet it was a sorrow that saved that same world from the dominion of sin and death.

For the Son descended into the darkness of a cosmos fractured by sin, and the darkness could not withstand the light of His glory.