I tell the story of the life of Jesus Christ step by step in my podcast The extraordinary story But last fall, it all came to an abrupt end, just as Jesus arrived at the precipice of Jerusalem and began his fateful final week on earth.

But since August 25th, it’s that time again. Finally. The first episode of the fourth season marks the beginning of Holy Week, which I now see with completely new eyes.

Jesus did much more during Holy Week than I realized, and I wondered why: He cursed a fig tree, compared himself to plants, told parables about weddings and work, explained the limits of political power, challenged the Sadducees and Pharisees, described the end times, and proclaimed a new law of love.

Then he died for our sins, and that part really left me perplexed.

The redemption of mankind through Jesus Christ makes a lot of sense – until you try to explain it to a general audience. Then you start to wonder: Why did Jesus have to die? Jesus says he redeemed us through his death, but why should he have to buy us back when he already owns the whole world and everything in it?

The analogies to salvation that I had heard did not help.

In his book No greater love, Edward Sri describes a typical example: A child disobeys his father and deserves a beating. But then his innocent brother steps forward and says, “Beat me instead!” – and the father does it. This may be a noble sacrifice on the part of the good son, but it makes the father look terrible – like a tyrant so filled with petty anger that he must attack someone. anyone, and an innocent boy will do just as well as a guilty one.

Sri quotes Saint John Paul II as saying that the redemptive value of the Cross does not come about in this way, but rather “from the fact that the innocent Jesus, out of pure love, showed solidarity with the guilty, thus transforming their situation from within.”

This started to make sense when I found an analogy that works for me: the story of Tom Vander Woude.

It’s a story I’ve told before: In 2008, a Virginia father’s 19-year-old son (who has Down syndrome) fell into a septic tank on his Virginia farm and couldn’t get out. So Tom literally jumped into the sewage, held his breath to go under, lifted his son onto his shoulders, and pushed him out before succumbing to the fumes and drowning in his son’s place.

The story changed my life, as I describe below—and now it changes my life again by describing redemption: Jesus leapt into the cesspool of sin to come among us and lift us out of it.

But before I could begin, I had to deal with the end of the week: the resurrection.

When I talk to my children about faith, I am inevitably confronted with the question: “Why are we so committed to the Catholic faith? In another country, wouldn’t we be staunch Muslims or Hindus?”

That’s an excellent question that I’ve asked myself before, but my new answer is the resurrection. Why do I follow Jesus and everything he said? Because Jesus rose from the dead – and Muhammad and the author of the Bhagavad Gita did not.

And how do I know he rose from the dead? My confident answer was my “10 Reasons Why We Know Christ Risen from the Dead” – until I was hit by another crisis. A theologian at Benedictine College showed me a book by a rigorous, honest historian and theologian that challenges every one of the typical apologetic reasons.

So before I re-told this extraordinary story, I also had to rebuild my understanding of the resurrection!

I began searching for answers, reading and listening to many scholars: scholars who believed in the resurrection even though they didn’t want to, and scholars who pointed out what the resurrection means for us here and now, long before we die.

I’ll get into the details on the podcast when I’m ready, but for now I’m convinced by Brant Pitre’s explanation of the “Sign of Jonah,” supported by Protestant NT Wright’s vision of “On earth as it is in heaven,” filtered through Bishop Robert Barron’s declaration that Jesus came to “make the world Eden again.”

Jesus did not come to Escapebut for us New edition the world – and that is exactly what Christianity has done. How do we know? Because Jesus spent his busy last week on earth telling us everything we need to know to restore every aspect of the Garden of Eden, from its plants to its marriage, and from the labor of “working” the garden to the power of “ruling” over it.

It was one of the most exciting times of my life as I embarked on a journey of rediscovering everything with new eyes. Join me here if you like.

This appeared at Aleteia.