Who is God in the cross of the Christ who is abandoned by God?

Rather, I shall now suggest that he was announcing a prophetic message after the manner of ‘oracular’ prophets, and that he was inaugurating a renewal movement after the manner of ‘leadership’ prophets. He was, in fact, to this extent very like John the Baptist, only more so.

The red thread that is both the center of and the impetus to testify to Paul’s story is the experience of the ministerial being of Jesus. The plot and purpose of the story is to reveal the divine hypostasis encountering our own hypostasis.

The sixteenth-century Saint John of the Cross coined the phrase “the dark night of the soul” to refer to a time of grief, doubt, and spiritual crisis, when God seems shadowy and distant.6