For because his victory over evil was to be a victory for us to share, so it had to be won on our level in our flesh.

Yet that conflict, though fought out in our world of space and time, was also the culmination of an eternal conflict in the spiritual world. So the onslaught was not merely physical: besides the flogging, the nailing, the hanging and the thirst, there was also the agony of soul which Christ endured. It began in the Garden of Gethsemane when the enveloping mass of evil gathered round him; it reached its climax in that hour of desolation on the Cross when all alone he was plunged deep down into the black darkness of the pit of evil. Until that hour he had always been able to rely on the consciousness of his Father’s presence; but now the sense, though not the reality, of that presence was withdrawn and he found himself in the lonely horror of Hell itself.

“The hour is coming, indeed it has come,” he had declared to his Apostles the night before, ”when you will be scattered, every man to his home, and will leave me alone; yet” he had added, ”I am not alone, for the Father is with me” (RSV, John 16:32).

But now he was filled with a sense of utter desolation; now it was “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (RSV, Matthew 27:46) – a question, not of doubt nor of lack of faith, but of wondering acceptance of his seeming abandonment, as he fulfilled the prophecy of Psalm 22, the first words of which he thus quoted.