We can not fully gauge what the cross must have meant to the one who is eternal God and perfect man at the same time.
One of the most mysterious affirmations of the so-called Apostolic Creed is that in which, after pointing out that Jesus Christ "suffered under the power of Pontius Pilate, and was crucified, dead and buried," we are told that he "descended into the underworld." Some have maintained that this clause of the Creed refers to a journey of Christ to the underworld.
But this supposed excursion of Christ to the dwelling place of the dead, as if Jesus were another Heracles or Ulysses or an Aeneas, has no support in the Bible. Jesus Christ himself taught that, just after his death, his soul ascended to Paradise, while his body lay in the tomb (Gospel of Luke 23:43). Therefore, these words can not be a testimony of what Christ did between his burial and resurrection. Its meaning is much deeper. This statement of the Creed is, in reality, a reflection on the nature of the sufferings of Christ on Calvary. It indicates that the passion of Jesus Christ on the Cross has a singular character. It is known that to kill by means of the cross was not another form of execution. It was rather a very cruel way of torturing to death the condemned. Not only Jesus, but many others among whom was also, it seems, the famous Spartacus, experienced the crucifixion. This phrase of the Creed, therefore, teaches that, in addition to the sufferings of any other crucified, Jesus Christ brought upon himself unique sufferings. And that peculiar affliction of Christ can only be described by a statement as surprising as this one of "descended into the underworld."
In reality, the sufferings of Jesus Christ on the cross are unfathomable for us. We can not fully gauge what the cross must have meant to the one who is eternal God and perfect man at the same time. We can only glimpse some things in light of the testimony that the Bible itself gives us of that passion of Christ. Jesus Christ was crucified on Golgotha, a place in the shape of a skull, then outside of Jerusalem. There, in addition to terrible physical pain, Jesus also suffered the scorn and scorn of his enemies, particularly from the chief priests and scribes. But the high point of these sufferings took place between twelve and three o'clock in the afternoon of that day when the Lord Jesus Christ was crucified. In the midst of the darkness that supernaturally fell and enveloped that bleak scene, there was a cry: "Eli, Eli, lama sabactani? This is: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? "(Gospel of Matthew 27:46). It was the voice of Jesus in which, in that hour of extreme agony, he was addressing his Father. Jesus endorsed the words of the book of Psalms 22: 1, a psalm of King David in which he prophetically announced what would be the sufferings of the Messiah. Jesus appeals to God with words that had never before been on the lips of the Lord with regard to his Father: "why have you forsaken me?" The Father forsakes the Lord. Never before has such a thing taken place. That is the great suffering of Christ on Calvary. This is the culminating moment of his sufferings, the lowest place to which the Lord descended in his voluntary humiliation, assumed to be our Savior. For Jesus, no affliction can be compared to that of being forsaken by his own Father. We have to ask ourselves about the reasons why the Father abandoned his Son in that moment of his life. According to the Bible, the Father does it because Christ is, on Golgotha, carrying our sin.
The consequences of sin are terrible. They bring the just separation from God. And Christ, the substitute of the sinner, voluntarily suffers the abandonment of his Father. The Son of God voluntarily takes upon himself this separation for the sake of those who believe in Him. He does so according to the will of his Father (Gospel of John 6:38, 10:18 and 17: 4). Let us note carefully that, for the Lord Jesus, his main agony on the cross was not constituted, therefore, by his physical suffering, but by being deprived of the consoling presence of his Father. The agony, then, of Calvary is indescribable. It is a torment of the pure soul of the Lord, which does not admit external representation since, among many other reasons, none can do justice to such spiritual anguish ...