I think again of Christ’s ‘passion,’ of how there was nothing tepid about his existence, how he lived life all the way up, even in the way he died, refusing the wine that had been mixed with gall (for its anesthetic properties) and exhausting himself so thoroughly, while he hung on the cross (and from the beating and scourging he endured on the way to the cross), that he was brought to the brink of death with relative swiftness (only six hours elapsed before he yielded his spirit). And yet it cannot be said, I don’t think, that he was overcome by this passion, or that he allowed himself to be possessed by it. For he had the wherewithal, or the presence of mind (I suppose I should say love) to make arrangements for the welfare of his mother, who, with one of his disciples, stood at the foot of the cross, and to ask his Father to forgive his executioners. Even when he cried out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,” he was quoting the first line of Psalm 22, from the Hebrew scriptures, which begins in hopelessness but which ends with the speaker’s rescue, by God. So that even though this line, when spoken by Christ as he neared death, was an expression of his loneliness and abandonment, it also directed those who would hear it, and understand it, to recognize his suffering and death as things that had been divinely appointed, and to see in his situation the fullness of his purpose, or mission.