It is not man who goes to God, but God who comes to man.

Almost all religions center around the problem of expiation; they arise out of man's knowledge of his guilt before God and signify the attempt to remove this feeling of guilt through conciliatory actions offered up to God. The expiatory activity by which men hope to conciliate the divinity and to put him in a gracious mood stands at the heart of the history of religion.

In the New Testament the situation is almost completely reversed, It is not man who goes to God with a compensatory gift, but God who comes to man, in order to give to him. He restores disturbed right on the initiative of his own power to love, by making unjust man just again, the dead living again, through his own creative mercy. His righteousness is grace; it is active righteousness, which sets crooked man right, that is, bends him straight, makes him correct. Here we stand before the twist that Christianity put into the history of religion. the New Testament does not say that men conciliate God, as we really ought to expect, since, after all, it is they who have failed, not God. It says, on the contrary, that "in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself." This is truly something new, something unheard of—the starting point of Christian existence and the center of New Testament theology of the cross. God does not wait until the guilty come to be reconciled, he goes to meet them and reconciles them. Here we can see the true direction of the Incarnation, of the cross.

Accordingly, in the New Testament the cross appears primarily as a movement from above to below. It stands there, not as the work of expiation that mankind offers to the wrathful God, but as the expression of the foolish love of God's that gives itself away to the point of humiliation in order thus to save man; it is his approach to us, not the other way about. With this twist in the idea of expiation, and thus in the whole axis of religion, worship, too, man's whole existence, acquires in Christianity a new direction.

Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity

I remember saying that Introduction to Christianity was a terrible name for this book by the cardinal who became Pope Benedict. It was no introduction at all as I think of it which would be gentle and easy to understand. However, it was good. Very good. As this sample shows. I need to reread it.