A passage from what I’d describe as Richard John Neuhaus’s master work, "Death On A Friday Afternoon":

God must die. It is a lie so monstrous that to suggest it invites instant annihilation — except that God accepts the verdict. Those who know the awful truth hear his voice. And Jesus said, “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify thy name.”

But how, we must ask, is God glorified by the humiliation and death of God? This great reversal of everything we think we know is too much to bear. Dark is light and light is dark, right is wrong and wrong is right and a lie is recruited to the service of the truth. The order of things is shattered. Precisely so, our disordered order is shattered so that things might be restored to order. And then Jesus said, “Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out; and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.” The ruler of this world — the lord of disorder and of disordered humanity in his thrall — passes judgment on the Judge of all. The judgment is so monstrously false that only by submitting to it can its falseness be exposed. By Christ’s submitting to the judgment of the world the world is judged.

Jesus might have been merely a moral teacher pointing out the grotesque error of the judgment. Christianity would then have become a school of thought promoting his moral philosophy. Jesus came, however, to be the Lamb of God, living out and dying out this falsehood that would not die unless taken to its final conclusion. Only in this way would he be lifted up and draw all to himself, not simply as our teacher but as our Savior and Lord. Only by submitting to our folly could he save us from our folly. The drama had to be played out all the way. St. John writes of the night before he died: “Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

He loved them to the end that they, too, might learn the way that is on the far side of outraged justice. That same night he told them, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.” And then he prayed for his friends, “Father, I desire that they also, whom thou hast given me, may be with me where I am, to behold my glory which thou hast given me in thy love for me before the foundation of the world.”

From before the foundation of the world. In the beginning was the Word. Did God — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — know from the beginning that it would turn out this way? From before the foundation of the world, from before the time when there was time, did God hear humanity’s fatal verdict: “God is guilty! Crucify him! Crucify him!”? And did the Son say to the Father, from the beginning, that he would go in the power of the Spirit to submit himself to the sentence of death? St. Paul suggests as much: “But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

Here we touch on mystery far beyond our ability to understand; we try to listen in on the conversation that is the very life of the triune God, the life of God that is the power and love that enables all to be. Our desire to understand is as inescapable as our failure to understand. The more we search and the deeper we go, the more we cry out with Paul: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” Yet surely the love with which Jesus loved the Father here on earth is one with the love of the Word that was in the beginning. The perfect self-surrender of the cross is, from eternity and to eternity, at the heart of what it means to say that God is love.

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