Where did I triumph if not on the Cross?

Where did I triumph if not on the Cross?  Are you [so] blind as ... to think that Golgotha was my downfall and my failure?  Do you believe it was only later – three days later – that I recovered from my death and climbed up laboriously from the pit of Hades to appear among you once again?  Look:  this is my secret, and there is no other in heaven or on earth:  My Cross is salvation, my Death is victory, my Darkness is light.  At that time, when I hung in torment and dread rushed into my soul because of the forsakenness, rejectedness, uselessness of my suffering, and all was gloomy, and only the seething rage of that mass of teeth hissed up mockingly at me, while heaven kept silent, shut tight as the mouth of a scoffer (but through the open gates of my hands and feet my blood bubbled out in spurts, and with each throb my Heart became more desolate, strength poured out from me in streams and there remained only faintness, death’s fatigue, infinite failure), and at last I neared that mysterious and final spot on the very edge of being, and then – the fall into the void, the capsizing into the bottomless abyss, the vertigo, the finale, the un-becoming:  that colossal death which only I have died.  Through my death this has been spared you, and no one will ever experience what it really means to die:  This was my victory.

--Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World