The Hidden God of the Cross

Today's Reading

Read 1 Corinthians 1:18-25 — Paul's most condensed statement of the strange logic of the gospel: "For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God... For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men."

Read 1 Corinthians 1:26-31 — God's deliberate choice of what is low and despised, "even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are."

Read Isaiah 53:1-6 and 10-12 — the prophet's vision of the suffering servant, written seven hundred years before Christ: "He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief... he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities... it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief."

Read Philippians 2:5-11 — the carmen Christi, the early hymn of Christ's self-emptying: "though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant... and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross."

Read Colossians 2:13-15 — Paul's startling image of the cross as the scene of God's victory: "He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him."

Reflection

There is a young Augustinian friar in 1518 named Martin Luther, six months after he posted his Ninety-Five Theses, and he is summoned to Heidelberg to defend his theology. He prepares a set of theses for the disputation, and at the heart of them is a distinction that has shaped Christian thinking about suffering ever since.

There are, Luther says, two kinds of theologians. There is the theologian of glory — the theologian who reasons from the visible greatness of the world up toward God. The theologian of glory looks at power, success, beauty, victory, health, and from these he infers an all-powerful, all-glorious deity. He calls the things he sees by the names he wants them to bear: he calls evil good if it has succeeded, and good evil if it has failed. He has constructed a god in the image of human aspiration.

And there is the theologian of the cross. The theologian of the cross looks at the place God has, in fact, told us to look — at the suffering and crucified Jesus — and he learns there what he could not have learned anywhere else: that God reveals himself under the appearance of his opposite. Power under weakness. Wisdom under foolishness. Life under death. Glory under shame. The cross does not just complement the Christian doctrine of God; it overturns the natural human picture of God and replaces it.

Luther's twentieth thesis at Heidelberg reads: "He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross." The next thesis, twenty-one, is more cutting: "A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is." Luther means: the theologian of glory looks at the cross and either denies what he sees or papers it over with metaphor; the theologian of the cross looks at the cross and says — yes, this is what it looks like, this is the place God chose, and the world's reading of power and weakness must now be revised in the light of it.

This is not a clever inversion. It is what Paul has been saying for fifteen centuries by the time Luther says it. We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called... Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. The Greeks looked for wisdom; God came to them through a public execution. The Jews demanded signs; God gave them a man dying as a criminal. The cross is not a setback to the program of revelation. The cross is the program of revelation. It is the place God has insisted on being found.

What does this have to do with the problem of evil?

Everything. The deepest objection to Christian faith in the face of suffering is not that suffering is hard to explain — it is that the God who could permit such suffering must himself be either indifferent or remote. The cross is the answer that no other religion gives. The God who permits the suffering has himself entered it. He has not stood at a distance from the cancer ward; he has hung on a Roman cross and tasted suffocation. He has not watched the death of his children from a balcony; he has watched the death of his Son from the bottom of his own heart. Whatever else the cross is, it is the place where every other religion's distant deity goes silent and the Christian God speaks — not by explaining, but by joining.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from Tegel prison in July 1944, weeks before he was hanged at Flossenbürg, sent his closest friend Eberhard Bethge a letter that has become one of the most quoted passages of twentieth-century theology. Bonhoeffer is reflecting on the difference between what he calls "religion" — the impulse to invoke God as a stopgap for problems we cannot otherwise solve — and the Christian faith. He writes: "God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us." And then the sentence that has been quoted by Christians at funerals for eighty years: "Only the suffering God can help."

It is one of the most counter-intuitive things ever said in Christian theology, and Bonhoeffer says it because it is true. A God who is omnipotent in only the obvious way — a God who solves every problem before it can hurt us — would not, in fact, help us. He would only relieve us. He would not have shared anything. The only God who can help, in the deepest sense, is the God who has been where we are. The God who has wept the tears we are weeping. The God who has prayed the prayer that did not get the answer the prayer asked for. The God who has died, alone, abandoned, with the cry "my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" still on his lips.

This is what Isaiah 53 had been saying for seven hundred years before the cross. "He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." Not in spite of his being God's servant — because he was God's servant. The Christian doctrine of suffering is not that God is far from suffering. The Christian doctrine of suffering is that, on the cross, God has identified suffering as the place where he is most determined to be found.

Bonhoeffer adds something stranger still: "Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving; that is what distinguishes them from the heathen." Read that twice. The natural religious instinct is to expect God to come to our aid in our suffering. Bonhoeffer reverses it. Christians, he says, are the ones who stand by God in his suffering. The cross is, among other things, God's grief — at sin, at death, at the wreckage of his world — and Christians are the company that keeps watch with him in that grief. The Christian life turns out to be Gethsemane, three friends who keep falling asleep, and one who does not. We are called to be the friends who do not fall asleep.

What does this mean for you, today, where you are?

It means that the place in your life where God seems most absent may be exactly the place where, by his own word, he is most present. Not because suffering is good. It is not. Not because the absence is illusory. The absence feels real because, in the most important sense, God has chosen to enter places where his presence is unrecognizable. He has been the one in the dark before you. He has prayed the prayer of forsakenness from the inside. The cross is the proof.

Look for him there. Luther says you will not find him in glory; you will find him in the suffering. Bonhoeffer says he will not help you by lifting the cup; he will help you by drinking it with you. Paul says the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. They are all saying the same thing. They are saying: where you are, even now, he is — under the appearance of his opposite, but really, fully, with you.

Going Deeper

Read 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 again, slowly, this time aloud. Notice every place Paul points away from human categories of strength and toward God's choice of weakness. Then ask yourself: have I been looking for God in the registers Paul tells me he will not be found? Where would I find him if I looked where the cross says to look?