On the Cross we see the cost to God of the sins of human beings.  As sin, both in itself and in its consequences is separation from God, so in offering himself on our behalf, Jesus voluntarily underwent, not indeed separation itself for that was impossible, but the full sense of separation.

Of his own will he deprived himself of the consciousness of his Father’s presence as he identified himself with sinful humankind, and bore our iniquities, and experienced in his own sinless soul the final consequences of sin.  What that meant to him who had always enjoyed the awareness of an inner undisturbed communion with his Father, we shall never know.  But to him it was the agonising horror of his whole life.  And so, as the light returned on Calvary, he expressed that agony of soul in the words of the 22nd Psalm which foretold his Crucifixion. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (NRSV, Mark 15:34).

St Leo has written that those were words not of complaint but of instruction.  For in Gethsemane he had already accepted the cup of suffering and of sacrifice which he was now drinking: “…not my will but yours be done” (NRSV, Luke 22:42).  So those words on the Cross were uttered for the whole world to hear; uttered so that we might understand the true meaning of sin and its results.

For it was the sense of the world’s sin, of the moral pollution of humankind that possessed his innermost being and blotted out the blessed consciousness of God’s presence, and brought this great darkness upon his soul.  He felt unutterably lonely and abandoned.  Yet he never lost faith; with his will he clung to his Father, and when he spoke it was. “My God”, still “My God”.