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.

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Coffee Theology

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