" The Friday event [ Good Friday ] must be seen as the culmination of the movement of the Creator toward the creation. Here the decision to be God-with-us is brought to its final test. Gethsemane, that cross before the cross, displays in the most dramatic and poignant terms the excruciating pain that such a final step entails: pain for the man who is our representative and priest; pain for the God whom he also represents. " ( p39 )
" .. what Jesus of Nazareth struggles with at Gethsemane, that second Garden of Temptation, is not simply whether he will or will not submit to the execution that his human enemies have been planning for him, but whether he will or will not reaffirm the divine decision to be Emmanuel. "
( p39 )
" .. in our Good Friday remembrance of [ the crucifixion ] , Christians celebrate the victorious decision of the Christ to traverse this final sad portion of the Via Dolorosa, to take that final step toward the world God loves. For all the pain of it, it is also a triumph over pain - the pain, namely, of the decision that has preceded it, the decision to go that far.
When this is understood, the victory of the Christ is not reserved for Easter Sunday; it is already fully present at Golgotha. " ( p39 )
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" We, whose movement in one way and another has always been away from the world, whether into our own private little worlds or to some theoretic superworld of our own devising - we, through our 'baptism into his death' ( Rom 6:1f ), are being directed toward the world where his life is being lived, hidden among the lives of those especially whom the world as such seems to have denied fullness of life ( Matt 25:31 ff ). " ( p41 )
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