God is Dead: Holy Saturday
We live and breathe stories. They shape our world; fill our air. Stories are the texture of our personality, the limen and horizon of our being. Stories are, to use a phrase by David Bentley Hart, "our souls turned outward." Yet, as Alan Lewis puts it in his beautiful book Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday stories we continue to retell run the risk of false necessity. Of course the boy gets the girl; of course the world is saved; of course. Ironically then, our own devotion to read and re-read scripture can betray us; we domesticate the story. Make it ours. And so the divine quiet of this saturday passes us by with the indifference of merely watching a play unfold, or listening once again to our favorite song. Surely it is beautiful and inspiring, but we are certain all the marks will be made, all the notes will be strummed. Which is to say with almost banal resignment: it will be alright. We win in the end.
And of course this is true. But, as they say, when the rubber meets the road, the platitude fails. Ironically far beyond most Christians, Nietzsche is the theologian of Holy Saturday par excellence because he understood the ramifications of what this day would mean if it were the last word:
And of course this is true. But, as they say, when the rubber meets the road, the platitude fails. Ironically far beyond most Christians, Nietzsche is the theologian of Holy Saturday par excellence because he understood the ramifications of what this day would mean if it were the last word:
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: "I am looking for God! I am looking for God!"
As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. Have you lost him, then? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances.
"Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition?
Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto." (The Joyful Science, 143)
Thus Nietzsche knew: in God's absence all tragedy is absolute. And given the often tragic character of life, it seems we all take a position in the silence of Holy Saturday. When a loved one dies, when one you love rejects you for another; when a career fails or debts swell like an unconquerable ocean, the question comes: where is God? O Story where is thy strength? The "of course, we win in the end," seems horribly absent. But of course it is not the story, truth be told, that has failed. And whats more, as Francesca Aran Murphy writes: "God is not a Story." The silence, the burn of doubt is often, I claim, the collateral of the fire burning down our idols. We do not find God where we thought because the god we thought to find is not. As Augustine wrote so long ago: "if you comprehend it, it is not God." Or just as well, as Augustine wrote in the City of God: "if you have reached an end, it is not God." (bk.12 ch.18) For even in our doubt, God has preceded us: "[atheists] will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist." (G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy p.139).
But what is this to mean for us? It means that even in the perceived absences of God, faith is still operational. It means that our tidy little stories of what power is, or what prestige, or capacity, or effectiveness are, that these themselves are idols we erect in order to control the circumambient chaos--or at least produce a facsimile of a control. Yet our lives as Christians, in John Yoder's wonderful phrase, should not be governed by plans from mere cause and effect, but from cross and resurrection. The Cthonic forces will always surge above our dams; the demonic will laugh at our apotropaic wards: "Jesus we know, and Paul, but you...we do not know you." (Acts 19:15). And then they will beat us senseless. But what has been sundered and rendered opaque is not God. Merely our god surrogate. What has been shown otiose is not power, but our limited understanding of it. Lewis writes:
It is a very different God, and a very different power, that we have discovered in the story of divine self-emptying, God’s capacity for weakness, the ability - without loss of Godness – to suffer and perhaps to die. This is the triune God of Jesus, fulfilled, majestic, glorified through self-expenditure in the lowly ignominy of our farthest country. There is power here, resurrecting, death-destroying, Devil-defeating; but it is the power of love, defying human expectation, which flowers in contradiction and negation, allowing sin its increase and giving death its day of victory, but only the more abundantly to outstrip both in the fecundity of grace and life. To live in the face of death an Easter Saturday existence, trusting in the weak but powerful love of the crucified and buried God, is itself to be objective, turned outward, away from self-reliance and self-preoccupation, away from our own determination to conquer death, which is in fact self-defeating and destructive. Instead, we are invited bravely and with frankness to admit or own defenselessness against the foe and entrust our self and destiny to the love of God which in its defenselessness proves creative and victorious. (Between Cross and Resurrection, p.431)Thus we must now in our weakness, trust. We must not try to seize history. Must not try to take over politics in the usual sense. Our action is in weakness, a weakness that is now a witness to the hope of interruption, a hope in darkness. Many mock the vow of silence taken by some orders of Monks; and perhaps there is some license taken to the Christian faith amongst those who have done such a thing. Yet much more charitably can we not see them as a sign? Instead of abandoning preaching the Gospel message are they not, in a sense, part of its indispensable core? Christ is risen! Yet we are still between times in the silence before the trumpet of the Archangel. So the Monk's silence is a sacrament: it is the roaring deafness of Christ on the cross, committed to the ends of God, yet only able now to mutely point beyond themselves to the beyond which too, is by many accounts, silent. Abyssus abyssum invocat. Abyss calls out to abyss. Those who are penniless in starvation call to God. Those loveless, call to God. Maranatha. Come Lord! Yet, as Oliver Davies writes, even the silence is pregnant with the meaning of God:
The infinite [emptying] 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. (A Theology of Compassion p.220-221)
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