In submitting to being crucified, in plunging into God-forsakenness, the Son is giving an ultimate demonstration of how “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son”. There is nothing feigned here: the Father actually and in all seriousness leaves his Son lying on the ground, in order to go to the stranger, the enemy, man, and to draw him to himself. The Son’s passive, suffering love becomes at once the upright and the inverted mirror-image of the Father’s love.
