This goes right to the ultimate focus of our faith, esquire198, and its deepest mystery: the Holy Trinity.
The great theologian, St Thomas Aquinas, stated that God is impassible, he cannot suffer. And yet, while this seems highly plausible, since we cannot know God in his deepest essence and anything approaching his whole scope, it seems to me that that was not how how Christ wants us to see Him; but rather the contrary. He wants us to focus on God in an aspect that is ultra sensitive and ultra human - as Christ was himself, of course, in his humanity - instead of as a Judge Dread, Terminator kind of android, the stuff of young male fantasies. Hey, it's not for young men to wear their heart on their sleeve, least of all among their peers. Christ too, although, for our sakes, seems to have been as roughly spoken as he could be. I've never read any work of fiction or non-fiction in which a character was habitually so roughly spoken. And never more so, usually, than when he was actually performing his innumerable personal acts of kindness. Yet in his lament over Jerusalem, he let the cat out of the bag. He would have gathered even the stony-hearted, religious leaders to his bosom, as a mother hen her brood. But they would not.
"Philip, when you see me, you see the Father". As three persons in one nature, the Persons of the Holy Trinity are inseparable, so we have to cling to what Christ told us, as the only way we can begin to apporach an understanding of such deep mysteries. Incidentally, that means that even while Christ was dying on the cross in his humanity, in his Godhead he had never left his Father's side at any time. He is always there, always has been and always will be. So, what earlier posters wrote and quoted from scripture contribute to the explanation you are looking for, although since the deepest truths are spiritual and increasingly paradoxical the closer we approach the primordial truth of the Holy Trinity, they will always remain, to some extent, shrouded in mystery.
So, although it sounds horrifying to our limited understanding, there is this strange way in which Justice is - had to be - assuaged by that horrifying vicarious punishment on Golgotha. The "busy minds" of liberal putative theologians have apparently been trying to explain it away and discount this strange transaction of our redemption through Christ's suffering and death. But, in this they have been influenced by the liberal atheists (not honest agnostics, but militant atheists) and thus evidently see themselves as more compassionate and holy that Christ himself.
They end up discounting the binding words of scripture, even when pronounced most vehemently, emphatically and constantly by Christ himself. Not casting pearls before swine, but rather meekly cherishing the dross that swine throw in their own path. What a bitter irony, and teaching others to do the same.
Incidentally, in this sad country that I inhabit, Britain, much to the thoroughly commendable disgust and contempt of Moslems and people of other faiths, no seasonal Christian theme, such as the Nativity, is allowed on our postage stamps. And there are other similar prohibitions, all promulgated, not from a genuine concern for other faiths as, the architects of the policy claim, but through a hatred of Christianity.
