Christianity is Changing
“God is not to be found ‘on high’ in some super-exalted vision or experience that is no earthly good. God is found in the lowest, the dirtiest, the most execrable places, for our God is found hanging, suffering and in anguish and pain. When you stand on Calvary all you can see is the justice system at work; a justice system that was completely controlled by the mimesis of the mob. You see a legally prosecuted and executed criminal, ratified and confirmed by the two highest ‘courts’ in the Land, the Sanhedrin and Pilate. You see a beaten man, someone who has been tortured all night, someone who was treated like filth all night. You see a naked man, totally unclothed, open, vulnerable, shamed.
What you do not see is that you do not see God there. How could God possibly be there? Why would God possibly want to be there? The cross is seen from below, seen ‘kata sarka’ (A phrase it is important to understand often translated in 2 Cor 5 as “after the flesh”, but has nothing to do with something pious but rather with something hermeneutical, ‘kata sarka’ refers to one’s perspective.). The only people that end up on crosses are obviously the ones who deserved them.
We can’t see our scapegoats.
But God was there. Paul says in the bleakest, darkest, most hopeless of moments, God was doing God’s best work there. “God was reconciling the world to God’s self.” God’s greatest work is done where it seems God would most naturally be most absent. So it is in the Temptation stories and in the Gethsemane stories.
This is why beginning my own theology with a ‘theology of the cross’ is so important. God has gone deep, an almost fathomless journey, in God’s own self, down the abyss of human misery ~ shamed and mocked and tortured and accused and reviled, beaten and then crucified. And God has forgiven all this at the hands of humans, of his beloved creation, of her beloved sons and daughters. The crucifixion of Jesus was not a solution to a problem which is how most atonement theories treat it. The death of Jesus brought the Abba’s voice straight from the heart of the Creator right into human History. Forgiveness was announced and thus pronounced. The engagement of the creation and the Creator stood under the utterance of forgiveness. That is love.
I hope you can see right here how important it is to develop ones understanding of God as trinity right here and not out in some astro-meta-trans-physical way. In other words, the Gospel is about a God that does her best work in the darkest night, the bleakest hour, the worst of times. Here weakness is made perfect in the strength of the Other. A strength to prevail, the strength of pure love.
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