The Crucified God
Saint Paul's Cathedral, San Diego
Good Friday Liturgy - 6th April, 2007
David Moseley, Ph.D.
Theologian-in-Residence
Old Testament: Genesis 22:1-18
Psalm 22:1-11
New Testament: Hebrews 10:1-25
Gospel: John 19:1-37
The Crucified God
When Jesus had received the wine, he said, "It is finished."
Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
John 19:30
For all of us, tonight is the culmination of a long pilgrimage. We have all been traveling on a journey from the fertile, homely hills of Galilee in the spring, through the wilderness of Judea, to the city of Jerusalem thronged with visitors at festival time, and now through the tumultuous events of the last few days that have brought us to our destination - the foot of the cross.
Some of us at the cathedral have been traveling further afield than the well-trodden path of Lent. Back in August last summer, we set out on a different sort of journey in our monthly Sunday morning forums that started back at the high-point of the modern era in the Enlightenment - in many ways, a journey away from God, as human beings trusted in their own reason and judgment to explain away the phenomenon of God and the seemingly regressive practice of religious faith. Along the way, we have been confronted with many questions, many alternative hypotheses, and rival explanations that would render belief and trust in God archaic, quaint perhaps - even absurd. And yet, here we are at the foot of the cross.
In our odyssey through the problems and perplexities of modern philosophy and theology, we have been focusing in particular on what is in many ways the ultimate, eternal question - the problem of evil and suffering as it relates to belief in God. Philosophers call this the problem of "theodicy." Given the existence of evil and suffering in our world-where countless millions suffer and die needlessly from hunger and malnutrition, or from waterborne diseases, or preventable illnesses; where millions of civilians are caught helplessly in the middle of war and conflict, or are victimized by tyranny and genocide; where millions are imperiled by the arbitrary tragedy of natural disasters - tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes and floods; where even our own private anxiety, suffering, grief, depression, loss, and despair may be more than we can even bear; - given all of this misery, what possible reason could we have to believe in God; and what possible reason could we have to believe that such a God, if he exists, is a good God who is loving and compassionate and concerned for his creation? Such eternal questions torture us as we gather at the foot of the cross.
Throughout Lent, we have been trying to find our way back to a credible, Biblical faith that takes account of these "eternal questions" (Dostoyevsky), and have been following the remarkable work of Jürgen Moltmann, who charts this territory for us in his masterpiece, The Crucified God (1973). And now we have wandered in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights, through Holy Week, to Good Friday itself.
Nobody really likes Good Friday. How could you? Our thoughts wander ahead of ourselves to the triumph and celebration to come on Easter Sunday. But there's no "cheap grace" in Christian faith - there's no resurrection without there first being a Crucifixion on Good Friday. And if we don't wrestle with some of the big questions on Good Friday, then the joy of Easter will ring hollow. So, as we gather at the foot of the cross, let us consider some of those eternal questions about our Christian faith and identity.
First of all, let us consider who is hanging on the cross. It is God who suffers and hangs on the cross, for we worship a crucified God. We tend to fixate on the passion of Jesus of Nazareth, and almost forget that Jesus is the incarnate Son of the one true God, and therefore God himself is crucified in Christ. This idea was quite repulsive to early Christian leaders schooled in Greek philosophy who thought, as a matter of logic, that God transcended all human limitations, and thus God was incapable of suffering. But that conclusion could only be reached by turning away from the cross, for in the crucified Christ we witness "the image of the invisible God" (Barth). God demands of himself that which he spared Abraham.
But why should we want to speak of the suffering of God on the cross? Because our fundamental conviction concerning God is that "God is Love." Love cannot be compelled, but is freely offered and freely received. For God to truly love the world, he takes the great risk of the world refusing the offer of his love and fellowship. Love necessarily involves a terrible vulnerability - a vulnerability to the suffering of rejection. But that's the thing about Love - Love makes life so lively, and death so deadly. God gave himself to humanity in Christ, but was rejected by humanity. So God suffers on the cross, spurned by his own creatures.
In contrast to those Greek philosophers who wanted an invulnerable God, there are many others who cannot stomach the idea of a remote God cut off from the tribulations of human suffering. Can the righteousness of God be reconciled with the unrighteous suffering of the innocent? And so, as a protest against God's apparent indifference to the plight of humanity, God is rejected as irrelevant, at best; perhaps even malicious and sadistic at worst. We turn away from such a God, and live our lives as if he didn't exist, or could not be trusted with our devotion. We become "Godless." Or like so many victims of needless suffering, we cry out to the void: "God! Where are you? Do you even care?" And we become "Godforsaken." But this God that is ignored or repudiated by atheism - is this the same God we stare up at from the foot of the cross?
So, God is not isolated from or indifferent to human suffering. To his contemporaries, his life and teachings, his witness to the compassionate, welcoming, forgiving nature of God, was considered blasphemy. As they stared up the very public spectacle of the crucifixion, they would have seen what they regarded as a "Godless" man getting his just desserts. But did God himself become "Godless"?
As he hung on the cross, his mission on earth reaching its horrifying consummation of agony and alienation, Jesus cries out in despair: "My God! My God! What have you forsaken me?" What are we to make of this scream of dereliction on the cross, that recalls the pleading of Psalm 22? If God was in Christ, and we can look at the cross and see the "crucified God," could God himself become "Godforsaken"?
Beyond any atheistic talk of the "death of God," how are we to make sense of the suffering of Christ on the cross - his witness to God's intimate love for us as Abba, our "Daddy"; and yet, at his hour of greatest need, Jesus is abandoned by God on the cross?
This is the mystery of God at the heart of the crucifixion - not the "death of God" but death in God. For the cross is the consummation of God's dealings with us on earth as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Our focus on the forsakenness of the son, abandoned by his father, is sometimes in danger of obscuring the corresponding tragedy of the grief of the father who suffers the loss of his son. Why would the father give up his son? Why would the son surrender himself to abandonment and forsakenness by his father? Only out of God's love for humanity. God's love for humanity is so deep and profound that on the cross God enters into, and experiences the tragic extremities of, the human condition, so that they might be redeemed. And in spite of the dereliction of the son's cry of abandonment to the father that echoes across space and time, they are nevertheless united in their love for one another and their love for humanity in choosing this path - for it is the Holy Spirit as the dynamic of sacrificial love and resurrection power between the Father and the Son, that unites them in their separation.
We talk in riddles and paradoxes about such things, but how else can we make sense of this awesome mystery? The history of God includes this incredible event of love between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit at Golgotha. Your identity as a person, who you truly are, can be measured in part by the sum total of all of your life experiences that have made you who you are. Likewise, the crucifixion is part of the divine identity. The 'Death of God' / 'Death in God' has become part of his life of love and hope through the Spirit. God himself embodies tragic suffering and the hope of deliverance, justice and righteousness in the mystery of the cross.
This is how God chooses to save us from Godlessness and Godforsakenness - by becoming Godless and Godforsaken himself.
Let's say something about the atonement here. Listening to TV evangelists, you'd think that cross is all about us, and not God. Let's be clear on this point: The Cross is first of all about God, who God is, how God acts, how God loves, how God reveals himself; and only in a secondary sense is it about our own salvation. It's not as if God's plan for the universe went belly-up, and he had to switch to Plan B. I call this "911 Theology": There's an emergency on Planet Earth, and God has to dispatch his son to sort it out. Instead, let us suppose that the cross is part of God's eternal, perfect plan. God creates the world, seeking human fellowship, knowing full well that he will eventually be incarnated in this world, rejected, will suffer, and will be crucified. But that's the nature of God and God's love.
Love is all about relationships - and God never stops relating to us. Even in our Godlessness and Godforsakenness, God is still there, through the cross. As the Psalmist puts it:
O LORD, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O LORD, you know it completely. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it. Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night," even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.
The cross is not God's oedipal punishment of the son, but God's profound act of identification, solidarity and fellowship-God's common cause-with all humanity. As Paul puts it in Romans 8:
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Last week I was reading through Tom Stoppard's absurdist masterpiece, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, with one of my classes. Stoppard turns the most famous play in western literature, Shakespeare's Hamlet, inside out - so that what happens on-stage in Hamlet happens off-stage in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead; and what happens off-stage in Hamlet happens on-stage in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead. Stoppard draws his inspiration for this piece of artifice from a few lines in T.S. Eliot's poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," where the narrator makes the following melancholy observation:
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous-
Almost, at times, the Fool.
We want to be protagonists in life, not spectators on the sidelines. And when we picture ourselves at the foot of the cross, we want to find ourselves in Jesus' words of forgiveness, and not in the agents of hate and revenge and anger that nailed him there. But the violence of the cross is a human initiative. Only human beings could concoct such a dehumanizing spectacle as crucifixion. Indeed, the true victims of the cross are those who sacrificed Jesus, laboring under the delusion of the supposed efficacy of sacred violence, scapegoating, revenge, and other forms of retributive justice.
As the author of the epistle to the Hebrews points out in our New Testament lesson, the death of Jesus on the cross represents the death of sacrificial language altogether. God climbs into our sacrificial machine, throws himself on its moving parts, and eternally cripples it with his mangled body - his broken flesh and bones cripples the sinful human mechanisms of violence and revenge as solutions. The scapegoat is sent out into the wilderness - but miraculously, to the consternation of all those assembled, it comes back, unblemished and pure.
So, the cross allows us to "speak about God" (lit: Theos Logos - words about God) - and rather than projecting our own anthropomorphisms onto God, let us learn what it is to be truly and fully a human from God's own humanity in the crucified Christ.
When the Greek philosophers contemplated the mystery of "God," they posited a God who is "impassible" - incapable of suffering (Apatheia). The Apathy of God naturally corresponds to a form of idealized humanity that sought freedom from evil, anxiety and suffering in 'Stoicism' in imitation of the impassible "God."
But the Jewish prophets understood God's suffering (Pathos) in relation to his creation. The God of the Hebrews cares passionately for his people; and the pathos of God is answered by a corresponding openness (Sympatheia) of humanity to the suffering and needs of others.
What is so striking about the crucified Christ is the intersection we find of divine Pathos and human Sympathy. Beyond Apathy and Sympathy, the Crucified God represents the divine empathy of Incarnation - even to the extremes of Godlessness and Godforsakenness.
In Shakespeare's King Lear, the beleaguered old man only achieves true insight when he succumbs to madness - just as his counterpart, the deceived Duke of Gloucester, truly sees only when he is blind. Stranded on the barren heath, surrounded by the outcasts and overlooked in the middle of a terrible storm, Lear exclaims:
Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
King Lear - Act III Scene 4
Only when he enters into the depths of Godless and Godforsaken suffering and misery endured by his own abject subjects does King Lear experience the devastating epiphany of awakened empathy.
But is God really there, in worst forms of Godlessness and Godforsaken suffering? Eli Wiesel asks this question in his masterpiece, Night, which recalled the horror of Auschwitz. In one incident in particular, Wiesel is forced to witness the midnight hanging of a child - and as the boy dangles, asphyxiating, on the concentration camp gibbet, Wiesel suffers inside himself the terrible death of the credibility of a loving, compassionate God:
Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.
In all honesty, can there really be any theology after Auschwitz unless there is theology in Auschwitz? Dare we speak of the existence of a loving God in such a Godless and Godforsaken place? Where was God in the trenches of the First World War? Where was God when Stalin and Mao starved millions of their own people to death? Where was God in Pearl Harbor, the London Blitz, the siege of Stalingrad, the firebombing of Dresden, and the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Where was God in the killing fields of Cambodia? Where was God in the napalmed jungles of south-east Asia? Where was God when Balkan villages were ethnically cleansed? Where was God when warring tribes butchered each other with machetes in Rwanda? Where was God on September 11th? Where is God in the slow-motion genocide in Darfur, or the lethal streets of Baghdad?
And the only Christian answer on Good Friday, as we behold the Crucified God from the foot of the cross, is: God was riddled with machine-gun bullets in the "no-man's-land" between the trenches; God died of malnutrition in the Ukraine and the fields of China; God drowned on the U.S.S. Arizona, was blown to pieces in the East End of London, froze to death in Stalingrad, was incinerated in Dresden, and vaporized at Hiroshima; God was suffocated by a blue plastic bag in a Cambodian re-education camp; God was burned alive by napalm in Vietnam; God was shot in Srebrenica; God was stabbed and cut to pieces in Rwanda; God perished at the hands of terrorists in the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a lonely field in Pennsylvania; God is raped and mutilated by the janjaweed warriors in Darfur; and God is blown to pieces each and every day by car bombs and IEDs in Iraq...
Our God in the Crucified Christ enters fully into the depth and breadth of human experience and limitation, even the Godlessness and Godforsakenness of the cross. And because God has entered into the outermost extremes of human experience and absorbed these realities into his own divine life, therefore we as human beings can participate fully in the life and love of the Triune God.
So this is the mystery we gaze up at from our position at the foot of the cross. This is our God-our crucified God-and this is his love for us - that even in our disbelief, our unbelief, our brokenness and complete isolation, nevertheless God is still with us. Indeed, at such times, we are in God.
In the name of the bereaved and grief-stricken Father, and the abandoned and forsaken Son - and the love that unites them across the abyss of suffering and death, the Resurrection power of the Holy Spirit...
AMEN.
David Moseley, Ph.D.
Good Friday Liturgy - 6th April, 2007