But the heaviest sorrow, the terrible depth of which is completely incomprehensible to us, was, of course, the feeling of sin, voluntarily taken upon Himself by our Savior and weighed down on Him. If on us, sinful people with a coarse soul and a lulled conscience, our sin often falls as an agonizing burden, barely endurable, often leading to despair, then what should the Lord have experienced with His sensitive conscience, with His divinely pure soul that did not know sin, for He knew no sin (1 Peter 2:22)! After all, taking on the sins of people did not at all mean simply paying divine justice with Your blood and suffering for someone else's, extraneous sin in a purely external way, just as we sometimes pay the debts of our friends. No, it meant incomparably more: it meant accepting sin into one’s conscience, experiencing it as one’s own, feeling the full burden of responsibility for it, recognizing the terrible guilt for it before God, as if He Himself had committed this sin. And what a sin! Let us not forget that Jesus Christ was, in the words of John the Baptist, the Lamb of God, take away the sins of the world (John 1:29). The sins of the whole world, of all mankind from the first day of its creation, of all the countless generations of people who have changed on earth over a number of long centurie…all this Jesus Christ took upon Himself and all our sins He Himself bare with His own body on the tree, so that we, being dead to sins, should live for righteousness (1 Pet.2:24). Along with sin, the Savior had to take upon Himself its inevitable consequences, the most terrible for the soul: alienation from God, God-forsakenness and the curse that hung over us as a punishment for sin: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us, for it is written: Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree (Gal.3:13).
ibid.
Twentieth Century