He fully — both in His life and in His death — vanquished the creaturely infirmity of His human essence and offered it as a sacrifice of obedience to the Father's will. Thus, by His high-priestly ministry, by the sacrifice of His life, Christ acquired immortality: He earned and merited it. Nevertheless, it still had to be given to Him. Immortality, bestowed upon man not in the mortal but in the immortal or spiritual body, can only be an interaction, an act of synergism, between God and man. God bestows immortal life upon man when he becomes capable of and worthy of receiving it; but he is such only in the God-Man.

According to the general meaning of the teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews, Christ as High Priest offers Himself to God the Father by the Holy Spirit, and thus with the participation of the entire Holy Trinity, in conformity with the character of each of the hypostases. This sacrifice-offering is expressed in obedience, in the experiencing of infirmities and temptations, and finally in the shedding of Christ's blood in His death on the cross; here He is not only the sacrifice, the slaughtered Lamb, but also the sacrificing Priest in the sense that the offering of sacrifice is His voluntary deed. He Himself offers Himself as sacrifice to His Father. However, He accomplishes this sacrifice-offering not by His own will but according to the Father's will, to which He fully subjects His own, filial, Divine-Human will. He makes the Father's will His own will. Thus, the High Priest is not only fated to become a sacrifice, but He also wills this fate. We have here not only the presence of the sacrificial victim but also the sacrificial state, not only the fact of the sacrifice but also the offering of sacrifice.

The feat of redemption, as a sacrifice of love, has thus two aspects in the God-Man: (1) the sacrificial love of God, emptying Himself in His Divinity and, as it were, concealing Himself for Himself “in the form of a servant”; and (2) the sacrificial love of the Man who, while being absolutely free of personal sinfulness, takes upon Himself the sin of the entire world: this is His taking upon Himself by love of the burden of sin not committed by Him and alien to Him; this is the love of the God-Man for His fallen co-man. In the redemptive feat, His humanity becomes that which, in itself, it is not: It becomes sinlessly sinful; this is the love of the cross, symbolized by the intersection of two perpendicular lines.

But in His kenosis the Son no longer lives in union with the Father, just as the Father no longer lives in union with the Son; for the Father sent the Son into the world, and the Son was sent by the Father to the cross. We have here “the Father's crucifying love and the Son's crucified love” (Metropolitan Filaret's audacious expression), and in this sense this is their co-crucifixion. But in the human crucifixion of the Son and the divine co-crucifixion of the Father, love itself is co-crucified, the hypostatic love of the Father and of the Son — the Holy Spirit, the joy of love uniting the Son with the Father (as it is said: “through the eternal Spirit [Christ] offered himself without spot to God” [Heb. 9:14]). This joy fades in the night of the Garden of Gethsemane and in the pitch blackness of the ninth hour. The Holy Spirit, who always reposes upon the Son, also appears to abandon Him. The hypostatic love of the Father and of the Son is co-offered in sacrifice for the sin of the world and thus co-participates in the suffering on the cross. This love appears to become inactive in the night of the world. “It was night” (John 13:30), the night in which the Son of God was crucified and died in order to become “the triumphant power of the cross” (as Metropolitan Filaret says) in the Resurrection.

It would therefore be one-sided and incorrect not to include the night of Gethsemane in the redemptive sacrifice, this night in which the voluntary acceptance of the torment of the cross was accomplished. … which forms an indivisible whole with the day of Golgotha.

God tells His creation: You are created by My hands. You are My work, and you would not exist if I did not will it. And, since I am responsible for you, I take upon Myself the responsibility for your guilt. I forgive you; I return your glory to you, for I take your sin upon Myself; I redeem it with My suffering. O the depths and abundance of God's love! God Himself takes upon Himself the sin of the world that has risen out of precreaturely nonbeing, redeeming it with the corresponding suffering of the God-Man. And the entire Holy Trinity, because of its inseparability, suffers with the Son of God from this sin: the Father suffers as the Just Judge who judges His Son and, in His Son, Himself as the Creator of the world; the Son suffers as the One who is judged and bears the condemnation; and the Holy Spirit suffers as God's love, offering sacrifice and suffering, as the sacrifice of love for the sake of love — of God's love for the world. All of this constitutes the cup of Gethsemane. This cup is received on the night of Gethsemane, but Christ continues to drink from it on Golgotha as well, where God's justice that weighs on the Son reaches its maximal power in His forsakenness and solitude on the cross in the face of death: “why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46).

… There is no evidence in the Gospels that Jesus was ever subject to human sicknesses. In other words, voluntarily bearing the infirmity of the natural world and of the human essence, Jesus was not subject to sicknesses or the threat of death; mortality remained alien to His humanity.

This mortality could only have been voluntarily accepted or admitted by the human essence of the Savior, …

However, Christ's suffering and death could only have been coercive, since they were not natural but voluntarily accepted: these were not sicknesses with natural death as their consequence but torture and murder (mocking, scourging, and crucifixion: see Matt. 20:19). This was the slaughter of the sacrificial lamb. …

… But this death is the crowning of the entire redemptive feat, its end and the beginning of the new life. The cup of Gethsemane is also the cup of death, the funeral baptism for the new life: “Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?” (Rom. 6:3; also 6:4-10). … But Christ's passion and death are not similar to any human death, for His is a voluntary, unnatural death that, together with spiritual death, He took upon Himself because of the sin of the world. This is not just an external event or an evil chance that did not necessarily have to take place; nor was this merely the misfortune of an individual human being.

Christ's death was as authentic as His humanity: “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Heb. 2:14). To be sure, this human death could not touch the Divine essence of the very Author of life, for God cannot die. But He could humble Himself and become “obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Phil. 2:8). In its Divine aspect, therefore, the death of the God-Man must be understood as the extreme act of the kenosis of Divinity, accepted together with the in-humanization. … Diminishing Himself to creaturely human life, God empties Himself unto death, through which He enters into the repose of the sabbath (see Heb. 4:3-4, 9-11).

This death was not insurmountable and inevitable for Him, as it is for other men. He had the power to give His life by the voluntary feat of love and obedience; and for this reason His life is sacrificial and redemptive, for He Himself delivered His soul to death (see Isa. 53:12). According to His Divinity, the death of the God-Man was voluntary in virtue of His decision not to defend Himself against it by Divine power but rather to permit it and suffer it. In contrast, according to His humanity, His death was a coercive death, and it could only be such. … However, in living one life with mortal humankind, in the mortal world, Jesus was not protected against coercive death unless He wished to protect Himself against it in a divine manner, with "more than twelve legions of angels" (Matt. 26:53); but that did not, and could not, take place.