Good Friday Reflections

“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” These words pierce the suffering agony of crucifixion and in turn carry its own peculiar suffering of abandonment. The Christ, the one we call Lord, is dead. All of our concepts of who we think God was and is are nailed to that cross. We can no longer assume we know God apart from the cross. When we look at the Cross we are perplexed, confused, lost. We may find ourselves much like the disciples- fleeing from the death of the one whom they once followed. They cannot face the utter failure of Christ’s message. Jesus, the one who preached liberation to the oppressed and a new Kingdom of love, met utter failure as one killed by oppressors. The experience of the cross for Jesus was met with a total discontinuity from the message that he preached. The Kingdom of God is near, and yet on the cross Jesus experienced a hellish abandonment. Can we come to any other conclusion? The unique event of the cross is that the Powers of politics and religion combined in a very common way to put to death the social threat that was Jesus.

We try, rather unsuccessfully, to explain away Jesus’ cross. We don’t like it. The cross rightfully makes us uncomfortable. We are embarrassed that God has allowed the Powers of this world to kill God’s chosen One. So we think it necessary to protect God- we have devised systems of who God is for us that look past the cross to the resurrection. We talk of the cross as our justification before God, and don’t ask whether we are merely trying to justify God’s non-action on the cross. The resurrection is joy and hope; the cross is death and abandonment. We prefer to see God in the resurrection and see the cross only as a necessary step in the process. We like the God who raised Jesus from the dead and don’t know what to do with the God who allowed Jesus to die.

What I am trying to say, what Christianity must proclaim, is that the cross of Christ is a complete scandal. The cross affects God. This is why we cannot know God except through the cross. The cross alone is our point of reference. And the revelation of God through the self-emptying of God’s self in the cross is the complete abandonment of trying to make history come out right. We so often ask the question of ‘Why did God become human’ that we neglect an equally important question of ‘Why was Jesus killed.’ Jesus’ renunciation of ‘equality with God’ for the form of servant obedience unto death is the renunciation of any type of worldly control. The cross marks Christ’s willingness to suffer utter defeat. This obedience that refused coerciveness seems to be saying that the cross is the meaning of history, not power, domination or oppression. Jesus did not raise a sword to defend himself; rather he refused to cooperate with the powers of this world. This seemingly foolish way of being in the world resulted in death on a cross. But it is precisely at this point that the Christian understands God’s victory. The abandonment of Christ on the cross comes at the ultimate solidarity of God with all of the world’s suffering ones. The cross is not a sacrifice Christ does instead of us, it is Christ showing us how to give ourselves for the love of the other. This is why Paul writes that we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling to Jews and foolishness to the rest of the world. We want to argue that Christ justifies are existence, along with our own ways of controlling the outcome of history. But this is God’s task. The cross instead opens up the history of God as a Being-in-relation with and for the world.