The Christ of the Passion: Till Death Do Us Part
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When you stand at the site of someone’s death, it is a most sobering experience.

• Matthew 27:33-46
  
• “My God, my God—why have you forsaken me?”
  
• Richard John Neuhaus: “Something has been lost, something has been withdrawn, and it cannot be called back.” (Death on a Friday Afternoon 105)
  
  • Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”:
    The Sea of Faith
    Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
    Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
    But now I only hear
    Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
    Retreating, to the breath
    Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
    And naked shingles of the world.
    
  • “My God, my God, why—?”
    
  • G. Campbell Morgan: “If man imagines that he has now fathomed or understood the Cross, he is reminded by the very fact, that this cry is a question that something, perchance the mightiest and most marvellous of all the facts, eludes him, and defies his every attempt at final analysis. . . . [Christ] in the midst of the experience asks the question, ‘Why?’ It is never recorded that He asked such a question before. Never again is there record of so strange a fact.” (The Crises of the Christ 300, 301)

Is the cross about the human pain?

• Desire of Ages: “All His life Christ had been publishing to a fallen world the good news of the Father's mercy and pardoning love. Salvation for the chief of sinners was His theme. But now with the terrible weight of guilt He bears, He cannot see the Father's reconciling face. The withdrawal of the divine countenance from the Saviour in this hour of supreme anguish pierced His heart with a sorrow that can never be fully understood by man. So great was this agony that His physical pain was hardly felt.” (753, emphasis supplied)

No, it is about the divine price.

• Calvary is the price God paid to save this rebel race.
  
• How much did we cost Him?
  
  • We cost Jesus his life forever.
    
  • “There is no agony for the human soul like that of silence.” (The Crises of the Christ 301)
    
  • Desire of Ages: “Satan with his fierce temptations wrung the heart of Jesus. The Saviour could not see through the portals of the tomb. Hope did not present to Him His coming forth from the grave a conqueror, or tell Him of the Father's acceptance of the sacrifice. He feared that sin was so offensive to God that Their separation was to be eternal.” “It was not the spear thrust, it was not the pain of the cross, that caused the death of Jesus. That cry, uttered ‘with a loud voice’. . . at the moment of death, the stream of blood and water that flowed from His side, declared that He died of a broken heart. His heart was broken by mental anguish. He was slain by the sin of the world.” (753, 772)
    
• He thought that “Their separation was to be eternal.” And so “He died of a broken heart.”

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor demons nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38, 39)

“Nothing can separate us from the love of God.”