In that awful hour mercy and truth worked together and kissed each other…

The more truth entered into the innermost centre of man's sin and guilt, the more it involved man in ultimate conflict with God who is truth and love. It was not that Jesus was making mankind more guilty, but that his absolute consistency as holy love, his truth, was exposing the infinite guilt of humanity as he drew it fully and completely upon himself in all its utter violence in order to bear it and bear it away as the lamb of God in atoning sacrifice. Here we have the ultimate compassion of Jesus Christ in which he so pours himself out upon mankind and for them that he enters into the innermost citadel of sin in order to take it upon himself. In exposing it he, the truth, drew out all its hate and enmity, revealing its true nature as sheer hatred of grace, and then he bowed beneath it and bore it all on his own body and soul on the tree in holy and awful atonement, and with groanings that cannot be uttered. But in that awful hour mercy and truth worked together and kissed each other, as the Old Testament would put it. The cross is at once the absolute truth and absolute mercy. God is both just and the justifier of the ungodly, and what joins these together is the steadfastness or faithfulness of Jesus Christ both toward God and toward man.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 151–52