A Groan, Pushing Out Into the Void: A Brief Good Friday Reflection
We all love a good heroic story. Leonidas--The Lion!--stands before a brutish onslaught of Persian Immortals at Thermopylae shouting defiant obscenities at Xerxes ankle deep in the still warm blood of shattered thousands; Beowulf--the Bear-Wolf!--(despite whatever tragedy of his own story) amusing us with his complete chauvinism but while screaming fearlessly into the dark at the disfigured Grendyl; William Wallace's war cry of Freedom; Gilgamesh's epic is literally titled 'He who saw into the Deep," meaning the one who has, unlike all others, peered past the impenetrable veil of the gods into the secrets of immortality and goodness, and Gilgamesh--despite some very profound moments, such as Gilgamesh trembling at the demon-ogre Humbaba, and, at the end of the story, his thought provoking ruminations on the pitfalls of immortality--nonetheless is represented as the God-King, the strongest, the bravest, the most sure. And this is no aberration in classical Indo-European literature. Even in the Great Attic Tragedies such as those by Sophocles, it is not strength and bravery as such which are mocked--but hubris--that is to say, arrogance. Or in the heart wrenching apocalypse of Nietzche's prophet Zarathustra when he understands that God is dead, he himself has his own heroic gait as he screams "Then I love you, O Eternity! Then I love you, O Eternity!" into the great void, accepting joyfully the nothingness of his fate.
Which is to say, as this is leading into a brief reflection of Good Friday, that none of this is in itself regrettable. Hero worship, of course, is in its own sense a type of idolatry and must be avoided, but even the staunchest pessimist around us will say that these heroic acts are good, or beautiful. But what then, of Christ?
We see his broken body, lifeless upon the cross, the victim of many insults, torture, the complete defamation of his character. He is unsung, denuded, naked, his clothes are cast off and divided by lots. He wears an agonizing crown; he feared and trembled in the garden of Gethsemane to the point he sweat blood (his fear surely something we all understand! But not something that is generally allowed into "nobler" literature). But to see in this act either the lack of heroic nature (or even in some sense a heroism in the face of insurmountable odds on par with Classical literature) or the vagaries of a tragic act of someone who formerly announced the Kingdom of God, we fundamentally misunderstand. Even from purely the vantage point of Good Friday--if we could per impossible bracket out our knowledge at this moment of Easter and view this Friday--surely from this vantage not Good--as a horrible barbarism of the mechanism of state and religion conspiring against a lowly commoner, then we can still see a beautiful act of faith.
Faith is that strange animal, as we see here, that is neither active nor reactive, neither heroic (in the sense of taking upon oneself the entire burden of transforming the world) nor tragic (in the sense of a resignation) but is a hopeful anticipation of the future. But here too we become disappointed--reevaluated and ourselves exposed before the crushing silence of God the Father before the groans of His son, pushing themselves out into the void of the cold air around him. Christ sees himself as abandoned--Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani! He cries, My God, My God why have you forsaken me? And if we merely possessed the vantage of this Friday, as did his disciples, his mother, and Peter weeping at his betrayal, then this man has passed from the world into darkness. He was exposed hellishly to the margins and borderlines of faith, and instead of a triumphal paean of the angelic choruses marching in their legions to rescue him, there was only silence.
But from the vantage of Easter we see that our notions of the Heroic and the Tragic as two polarities that will never meet or be superceded, is in fact superceded in this devotion of Christ, even unto the silence of the Father.
Eberhard Jungel writes: “God became man in Jesus Christ in order to distinguish definitively between God and man forever…it would be important here to recognize the human God in the Crucified One, who is both divine and human in that he prevents man from becoming God and liberates him to be man and nothing other than man.” (God as the Mystery of the World pp.94-95) This is an eminently humanizing act of Christ, however horrible it seems, because it liberates mankind to be human before God, to allow for the unknown. Oliver Davies writes of this condition:
Hence in this figure of Christ, crucified, we see an aesthetic of the apocalypse: Not a beautiful, provoking form that simply confirms and conforms to our pre-existent expectations of what is beautiful or desirable, but an inherently interruptive nature, reconforming our expectations to see that this interruption, this defeat, alleviates man from his own devices. We are to be faithful before God and His coming Kingdom, even unto the silence of death. For beyond this there is the sidereal warmth of a light of new day beyond our control and just so our source of freedom: Resurrection.
Which is to say, as this is leading into a brief reflection of Good Friday, that none of this is in itself regrettable. Hero worship, of course, is in its own sense a type of idolatry and must be avoided, but even the staunchest pessimist around us will say that these heroic acts are good, or beautiful. But what then, of Christ?
We see his broken body, lifeless upon the cross, the victim of many insults, torture, the complete defamation of his character. He is unsung, denuded, naked, his clothes are cast off and divided by lots. He wears an agonizing crown; he feared and trembled in the garden of Gethsemane to the point he sweat blood (his fear surely something we all understand! But not something that is generally allowed into "nobler" literature). But to see in this act either the lack of heroic nature (or even in some sense a heroism in the face of insurmountable odds on par with Classical literature) or the vagaries of a tragic act of someone who formerly announced the Kingdom of God, we fundamentally misunderstand. Even from purely the vantage point of Good Friday--if we could per impossible bracket out our knowledge at this moment of Easter and view this Friday--surely from this vantage not Good--as a horrible barbarism of the mechanism of state and religion conspiring against a lowly commoner, then we can still see a beautiful act of faith.
Faith is that strange animal, as we see here, that is neither active nor reactive, neither heroic (in the sense of taking upon oneself the entire burden of transforming the world) nor tragic (in the sense of a resignation) but is a hopeful anticipation of the future. But here too we become disappointed--reevaluated and ourselves exposed before the crushing silence of God the Father before the groans of His son, pushing themselves out into the void of the cold air around him. Christ sees himself as abandoned--Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani! He cries, My God, My God why have you forsaken me? And if we merely possessed the vantage of this Friday, as did his disciples, his mother, and Peter weeping at his betrayal, then this man has passed from the world into darkness. He was exposed hellishly to the margins and borderlines of faith, and instead of a triumphal paean of the angelic choruses marching in their legions to rescue him, there was only silence.
But from the vantage of Easter we see that our notions of the Heroic and the Tragic as two polarities that will never meet or be superceded, is in fact superceded in this devotion of Christ, even unto the silence of the Father.
Dehumanized man, who must exalt himself, because he cannot ensure himself as he is, in practice uses religious…insights only in the interest of self-deification. As a result they do not help him achieve humanity, but only give greater force to his inhumanity. The knowledge of the cross is the knowledge of God in the suffering caused to him by dehumanized man, that is, in the contrary of everything which dehumanized man seeks and tries to attain as the deity in him. Consequently, this knowledge does not confirm him as what he is, but destroys him. It destroys the god, miserable in his pride, which we would like to be, and restores to us our abandoned and despised humanity. The knowledge of the cross brings a conflict of interest between God who has become man, and man who wishes to become God. It destroys the destruction of man. It alienates alienated man. And in this way it restores the humanity of dehumanized man. It shows his essential weakness without God (Moltmann, The Crucified God p.71)
Eberhard Jungel writes: “God became man in Jesus Christ in order to distinguish definitively between God and man forever…it would be important here to recognize the human God in the Crucified One, who is both divine and human in that he prevents man from becoming God and liberates him to be man and nothing other than man.” (God as the Mystery of the World pp.94-95) This is an eminently humanizing act of Christ, however horrible it seems, because it liberates mankind to be human before God, to allow for the unknown. Oliver Davies writes of this condition:
The infinite kenosis of Jesus, which is a condition of his infinite personhood, is that…relationship with Christ—which is faith—can be said to include its own cessation. The infinity of Christ’s personhood flows from the inner-Trinitarian relations, which are shown in the resurrection of Christ transcend death. In terms of the passion narrative itself, the divine Father-Son relation which appears to be extinguished in the Father’s silence as the Son dies on the cross, is regenerated in the glorification of the Son in the resurrection and in the new speaking of the Trinitarian Spirit which fills the earth. Thus, while every ordinary human relation must face its own end, not least on account of the contingency of life, the experience of alienation, or loss of relation, is itself discovered to constitute a moment within the relation that is faith. It can therefore be embraced as an aspect of the new way of relating [to existence] which faith brings. This is an interplay of light and dark therefore, whereby the boundary that marks the limit of the relation is discovered to be internal to it. In this we can ourselves come to inhabit the silence of God, which is the complete loss of relation, or annihilation, that Jesus experienced on the cross, and thereby come into the transformed reality of a new and Spirit-filled existence. (Theology of Compassion p.220-223)If we understand this crucifixion--what in many ways from the vantage before Easter is surely nothing other than a failure!--on its own terms, as darkness, silence, and death, but then see also what it means in the light of Easter, we see that failure, silence, disappointment are not themselves enemies of faith. Faith includes and supercedes them in itself. Or much better: God supercedes them. Our doubt, our fear, our trembling, are often moments of faith itself as God opens us beyond our limited horizons. In utter faith in the Father, Christ goes to death and his death serves as a giant quesion: will the Father that Christ proclaimed remember, and so verify, his supposed Christ?
Hence in this figure of Christ, crucified, we see an aesthetic of the apocalypse: Not a beautiful, provoking form that simply confirms and conforms to our pre-existent expectations of what is beautiful or desirable, but an inherently interruptive nature, reconforming our expectations to see that this interruption, this defeat, alleviates man from his own devices. We are to be faithful before God and His coming Kingdom, even unto the silence of death. For beyond this there is the sidereal warmth of a light of new day beyond our control and just so our source of freedom: Resurrection.
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