NOTES for Mar 15:16-39
Christ's death on the cross seems mysterious to many. It truly is mysterious, and if it does not seem that way to us today, it is only because the Gospel accounts have become familiar to us. So familiar that we no longer think about their mystery, taking everything described in them as common knowledge and self-evident. In reality, Jesus' death is an utterly incredible event. Not death on a cross - that can be explained by the sinfulness of fallen humanity - but the fact that death became reality for Him at all.
The matter is not only that He is the God-man: God's fullness in Him could be hidden, could become unconscious even for Him, and only He knows what He experienced at that moment. The state of God-forsakenness is familiar to us, and even in a certain sense habitual, and our nature corrupted by sin has adapted to such an abnormal existence for itself. But nothing of the kind can be said of Him: He was born and grew up conscious within Himself of God's fullness, and to lose it was for Him a trial we simply cannot imagine. The matter also lies in the fact that, for human nature in general - and for transformed human nature, such as the Savior's human nature is, especially - death is an unnatural phenomenon. To us it seems natural, and in a certain sense it truly is natural for us, but only in the sense in which, for example, the presence in an addict's body of the drug that is killing him is "natural." For normal human nature, death is something unnatural, and for transformed nature it is directly impossible.
How then could the Savior die, even from the point of view of His own humanity? Death obviously could not have become reality for Him in any way unless... unless He Himself, absolutely voluntarily, fulfilling the Father's will, consented and resolved to enter it. To come into contact with it. To make it voluntarily, for Himself and for His own existence, just as real as it is real for us apart from our will. To do this for our sake - because otherwise even the fullness of the life of the Kingdom that He brought us would have remained incompatible with our fallen nature. God's fullness had to be brought into the world not simply in human nature; it had to enter the world clothed in mortal human nature, absolutely identical to our own in our present condition.
The only difference was that our mortality turned out to be the involuntary consequence of a sin committed by free choice, while His mortality was a temporary condition He voluntarily accepted upon Himself, unconnected with any sin. In this sense Jesus' death was truly absolutely voluntary: without any compulsion or necessity, He agreed to enter a condition entirely unnatural to Him and absolutely foreign to Him. Here He was moved not by necessity or inevitability, but by love - for the Father and for those whom He wants to save.