Good Friday and Justification

"This is the righteousness of God: that God is the eternal and almighty Father and is at the same time the Son who came as a man in poverty into the world, perishing in and by the world, that is, Jesus Christ, crucified in weakness (2 Cor. 13:4). God is righteous in the lack of internal contradiction in this extreme tension between the almighty Father – the origin of all life and being – and the Son who suffered death. This is where the foundations lie for the fact that the ungodly are justified. Justification is inconceivable without God taking on himself the results of human ungodliness and in that very way remaining God. Only in his identification with the crucified Christ, made ungodly in his accursed death, is God’s righteousness so evident that humans, though they make themselves ungodly, can become righteous." --- Eberhard Jüngel, Justification (pg. 79)