Views of the cross #3: God dies

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel tells the harrowing story of watching a boy hanged in Aushwitz. As the boy gasped out his final moments, Wiesel heard someone in the crowd ask: "Where is God? Where is he?". And then again, as the boy's death throes went on and on, "Where is God now?". The answer which came to Wiesel as he watched the dreadful scene was: "God is there, hanging on a gallows".

When Christians speak of Jesus Christ as the Son of God, they mean not simply that he was an especially holy man (though he was), but that in Christ God becomes a human being. And so when Jesus suffered fear, pain, abandonment and even death, some have argued that here God himself learns what it is to suffer, to be abandoned, and even to die. When Jesus cries from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", God himself becomes, paradoxically, Godforsaken. And if God has identified so completely with broken humanity, submitting himself even to death, then there is no terrible place of suffering where he cannot be found.

Comments

Halloween

It's that magical time of year again - that one night when my small neighbours knock on my door asking for sweeties. This year, I'm properly prepared: I have two pumpkins (I wanted five, but decided to be thrifty), a big tub of sweets and a tube of 100 glow sticks. The sweets are my concession to popular demand; the glow sticks are an attempt to represent light in darkness (a symbolism which will doubtless be lost on the kids). I'm seeing the pumpkin as my main opportunity to communicate something of my Christian faith to my neighbours. One year, while I was at theological college, Halloween fell on a Sunday. The new housing estate church I was assigned to met in a church hall on Sunday afternoons and many of the congregation were unaccompanied children. I googled 'Christian pumpkin carvings' and guess what - there are a lot of ideas out there, America being a country which is big on Halloween and big on Christianity too. I decided to carve a simple f...

Only connect

Last year on Ash Wednesday I attended an ashing service at St Paul's Cathedral. The service focused on confessing our sins and asking God's forgiveness. During the service a berobed priest made the sign of the cross in ash on my forehead. I thought this was pretty cool and refused my husband's request that I rub it off for the train journey home. Then we ran into an old work colleague of mine and I felt rather stupid. Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, is all about sin and repentance - 'sackcloth and ashes' and all that. But I wonder how many people in the UK today identify with the idea that they are sinners in need of forgiveness? My final year dissertation at theological college focused on the dilemma of how to call to repentance people who do not think they have anything of which to repent. I certainly didn't think of myself as a sinner when I first started exploring Christianity. I knew I wasn't perfect, but hey, who is? I have hea...

Do not fear

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash When I was 15 years old there was a particularly unpleasant murder which was splashed all over the news. The culprits were identified, given long prison sentences and, many years later, new identities upon their release. I remember watching news footage of the defendants being brought to trial in a prison van, angry crowds screaming abuse as it drove past. My mother's perspective on this was interesting. "We all have darkness inside us," she explained. "It's easier to scream at it in someone else than to face our own." Today is All Hallows' Eve: for the past week, pumpkins, skeletons, witches and ghosts have loomed at us out of shop windows, from supermarket shelves and strung up as decorations outside homes. Tonight it reaches its peak as many of us, adults and children, dress up in the things we most fear. Axe murderers, which come to mind whenever we're alone in the house and hear a creak on the stai...

Coffee Theology

Search This Blog