The masterpiece of the Father's divine mercy is redemption.

In effect, it is only because of his mercy that Christ was given to man. "Between us and God," observes Anthony, "there was great discord. In order to overcome it, it was necessary that the Son of God become man, marrying His nature with ours."

Many internuncios and intercessors went to God, and they prayed with insistence that the much hoped for peace would arrive, but they were not satisfied. Finally, the Father yielded and sent His Son, to whose divine nature He united a human one in the virginal breast of Mary.

No one could reconcile man with God, except for His Son.

And the reason for this is intuitive. "If two enemies," Anthony observes cleverly, "were to fight each other with swords in hand, who could step between them to stop them, but one who had affinities with both one and the other? God and man were fighting each other: God with the sword of punishment, man with the sword of guilt. No one could resolve the fight. Then came Christ, similar to both one and the other being both the Son of God and of man: he stepped in and stopped them both.".

In incarnation, without either melting or mixing, divine nature and human nature meet and unite in the most intimate way: they form an essential unit in the person of the Word, constituting a unitary being, the Man-God Jesus. Each of his two natures conserves its own characteristics and its own activity. The union detracts none of the Word's perfection and leaves the reality of nature intact.

But, that which renders this union truly unique is the fact that the human nature of Jesus, although perfect and whole, does not posses itself. That which is most personal, singular and incommunicable in each man is that he, as a man, can say "I" and he belongs: he is a person. In Jesus, there is no human person who supports his human nature, next to the person of the Word; but the Word possesses and makes his human nature, he serves as his subject. The union is soldered in this way, mysteriously, in the person of the Word. His humanity is brought to life and made noble by the Word, it is the created and sensitive instrument. It is a nature that belongs personally to God and, for the person to whom it belongs, it forms, in union with the divine nature possessed by the Word, a single being, Jesus Christ.

Saint Anthony affirms this with the stupendous and well-chosen image of the sun, "As a ray of sun descending from the sun illuminates the world, although it never moves away from the sun, in the same way the Son of God, descending from the Father, illuminated the world, even though he never separated from his Father, because he and his Father are one thing." And, taking Augustine's words as his own, he continues, "Where one reads: 'the Word has been made flesh,' the true Son of God is recognised in the Word, and, in the flesh the true Son of man, both together in a single person: God and man.

The splendid image of the sun also explains, as far as is possible for the human intellect, the nature of the "mission" at the heart of the Trinity: as an entity it is an eternal act, terminatively it is a temporal act that does not change the divine persons. It is a new way of being, and the persons sent are always intimately related with the person.

Since the Father loved His Son with infinite predilection, why did he want him to die on the cross for our redemption? Couldn't he forgive the sins of men with sacrificing His Son? Here we come to the question of the need for the passion of Christ for the salvation of man. It is pointless to expect a satisfying answer from Anthony. The first person to address the issue in a systematic and scientific way, trying to find a solution, was Saint Anselm of Aosta, with the theory of penal satisfaction.

It seems certain that Anselm's soteriology, based on the juridical assumption that divine justice, damaged by sin, should be compensated for and avenged with the death of the innocent Son, had no effect on Saint Anthony. Even though he speaks of the angry Father, who Jesus placates with his suffering, it is clear that the saint is only using an anthropomorphic language derived from the Bible. Reconciliation, achieved through the passion of Christ, produced no change in the Father, who is immutable God. It is in redeemed man, instead, that a radical transformation happens, because with reconciliation he returns to God and opens himself once more to love.

Redemption is conceived by Anthony as a new creation (recreatio), as a rejuvenation of humanity; a return of humanity to the integrity of its primitive life in the good old days of its adolescence.

Without a doubt, human redemption is an incomparable love poem. Paul conceived of it in this way (cf. Ef 5, 2), as did Anthony. He illustrates this thought, that became dear to the Franciscan school, with two stories, one taken from the Gospel, the other from the Passio Saint Sebastian: the parable of the woman who lost one of her ten drachmas (Luke 15, 8-10) and the dramatic tale of the king who had lost a gold ring mounted with a precious stone. Both stories show God's displeasure for the loss of humanity and his love, that pushed him to sacrifice to rediscover it.

Redemption is the fruit of love. Love is answered by love. Jesus loved man enough to sacrifice his life; therefore, he deserves to be loved by man.