“God, according to Luther, is found first on a cross, beaten and dead, not as a masochist but as a bearer of what is, a God who takes on our destiny of death in all its forms…God is found in the despair of the cross. God is found in our many deaths, bringing possibility out of nothingness.” – Andrew Root, The Promise of Despair
You have faced a lot of deaths this week, Soul. A combination of rejection, disappointment, and outright grief at the losses and lesions that have made this the Very Worst Holy Week Ever. And now this night God is dead.
It is okay for God to be dead. Yes, Soul, there is an overblown Newsboys concert presently in theatres dressed up with interviews from the Duck Dynasty boys (bois?) that loudly proclaims God’s Not Dead! but in order to really call yourself Christian you have to meet the dead God. Have you met that God, Soul?
Can you look at God’s broken body, wracked with abuse and despair? Or is that too hard for you, Soul? Is our God only someone you understand when you are on the mountaintop, ignoring the piercing gaze of the monster of Death through the feeble veil of mass-marketed, glossy, high-octane saccharine joy? Or will you look at the dead God, who has entered into despair to destroy it from within?
It is comfort that God dies. Because in God’s death, God knows the despair that is winding its stitches through the sinews of your heart and body. God knows your loneliness, your brokenness, your sorrow unto death. Soul, can you enter into the passion of the despairing Christ, who despaired to rob the monster of death of its power? Can you look with awe on the one who gilt the trees with blossom and leaf, now himself pierced upon his very creation? The one for whom the earth shakes, wracked with sobs? It is here that God is lifted up and glorified in the flesh of the failed Messiah, the abandoned Teacher, hung on the tree and clothed in ragged, whispered promises of resurrection.
Soul, let yourself be crucified with God. Die with God that you may rise with God. In your darkness, in your wounds, in your ache and sehnsucht, there is God crucified, beaten, and dead, absorbing your despair as God undoes death from the inside. That is, after all, the only way to destroy the monster: from within. Do not rush the resurrection. Let God linger in the grave, sitting with you in your death. And when your death has been consumed, it will blossom forth in new life, Soul.
“In the tomb in body, in Hades in the soul, in Paradise with the thief, and seated at the right hand of the Father, you did circumscribe all things, oh Christ, yourself uncircumscribeable.”
THE REV. NATE CRADDOCK 