As Zizek explains Hegel’s answer to the Anselmian question, it is a political question: “why cannot we conceive a direct passage from In-itself to For-itself, from God as full Substance existing in itself, beyond human history, to the Holy Spirit as spiritual-virtual substance, as the substance that exists only insofar it is ‘kept alive’ by the incessant activity of the individuals? Why not such a direct ‘desalienation,’ by means of which individuals recognize the God qua transcendent substance the ‘reified’ result of their own activity?”

Why can’t the Lord simply send out His reconciling Spirit and bind everyone in sweetness and love?  Why the “deviation” through the cross?  Why is that socially necessary?

Zizek answers, “Reconciliation cannot be direct, it has FIRST to generate (appear in) a MONSTER - Hegel uses twice on the same page this unexpectedly strong word, ‘monstrosity,’ to designate the first figure of Reconciliation, the appearance of God in the finite flesh of a human individual: ‘This is the monstrous /das Ungeheure/ whose necessity we have seen.’ 20 The finite fragile human individual in ‘inappropriate’ to stand for God, it is die Unangemessenheit ueberhaupt /’the inappropriateness in general, as such/ - are we aware of the properly dialectical paradox of what Hegel claims here? The very attempt at reconciliation, in its first move, produces a monster, a grotesque ‘inappropriateness as such’? So, again, why this weird intrusion, why not a direct passage from the (Jewish) GAP between God and man to the (Christian) reconciliation, by a simple transformation of ‘God’ from Beyond to the immanent Spirit of Community?”

Another way to say this is that the community has to be embodied in an individual man, as parental love is embodied in a child: “While observing Napoleon on a horse in the streets of Jena after the battle of 1807, Hegel remarked that it was as if he saw there the World Spirit riding a horse. The Christological implications of this remark are obvious: what happened in the case of Christ is that God himself, the creator of our entire universe, was walking out there as a common individual. This mystery of incarnation is discernible at different levels, up to the parent’s speculative judgement apropos a child ‘Out there our love is walking!’, which stands for the Hegelian reversal of determinate reflexion into reflexive determination - the same as with a king, when his subject sees him walking around: ‘Out there our state is walking.’ Marx’s evocation of reflexive determination (in his famous footnote in Chapter 1 of Capital) also falls short here: individuals think they treat a person as a king because he is a king in himself, while, effectively, he is a king only because they treat him as one. However, the crucial point is that this ‘reification’ of a social relation in a person cannot be dismissed as a simple ‘fetishist misperception’; what such a dismissal itself misses is something that, perhaps, could be designated as the ‘Hegelian performative’: of course a king is ‘in himself’ a miserable individual, of course he is a king only insofar as his subjects treat him like one; however, the point is that the ‘fetishist illusion’ which sustains our veneration of a king has in itself a performative dimension - the very unity of our state, that which the king ‘embodies,’ actualizes itself only in the person of a king. Which is why it is not enough to insist on the need to avoid the ‘fetishist trap’ and to distinguish between the contingent person of a king and what he stands for: what the king stands for only comes to be in his person, the same as with a couple’s love which (at least within a certain traditional perspective) only becomes actual in their offspring.”

Why the God Man?  Because that’s the way the church is unified, in the “fetishist illusion” of person of a suffering Head.

Even if we can’t buy all of this, and we can’t, it seems to me that Hegel and Zizek are asking precisely the right question: Why does the reconciliation of human beings with one another require a cross?  What is the political necessity of the atonement?