In John’s Gospel, just before he dies on the cross, Jesus says, It is completed. A sense of his mission fulfilled. In Matthew’s Gospel, which we read last Sunday, Jesus cries out from the cross, Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani? Meaning, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Or, why have you abandoned me? It’s a quotation from Psalm 22, which we read earlier in today’s liturgy – a holy song of desperation and desolation. 

The Church’s understanding, for 2000 years and counting, is that Jesus was both fully human and fully God. How can God abandon God? 

G. K. Chesterton, an early 20th century Christian writer, has a wonderful reflection on this mystery; listen – 

“If the divinity of Christ is true, it is certainly terribly revolutionary. That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already. But that God could have God’s back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. 

Christianity has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. 

In that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt, and passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. 

When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken by God. 

And now let the revolutionaries of the world choose a faith: they will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Indeed, let the atheists themselves choose a God. They will find only one divine figure who ever gave voice to their isolation, only one religion in which Godself seemed for an instant to be an atheist.” 

I love that. And this year, through our Lent reading group, I stumbled on something that took me deeper into this mystery. 

Over the past many weeks, a group of us read a book called For such a time as this: An emergency devotional, written by Hannah Reichel, who studies the German theologians who resisted the Third Reich, the Nazi regime. One figure she often mentions is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian – meaning, somebody who thinks and writes about God, and how God relates to the world and humanity, and what it means for people to belong to God. Bonhoeffer wrote about how to follow God’s ways faithfully when it’s hard, when it’s dangerous. Eventually, after deep soul-searching, he became part of a plot to try and assassinate Adolf Hitler, choosing to cause harm with the goal of ending greater harm. The plot failed, and many of the conspirators were arrested. Bonhoeffer was imprisoned, and eventually executed, just days before the end of the war. He was 39 years old. 

Reichel mentions that Bonhoeffer saw discipleship – the path of following Jesus, and trying to live as he taught – as solidarity with God in God’s suffering. That caught my attention, partly because it’s so different from the way many people have been taught to think about the meaning of Christ’s death on the cross. 

The Bible uses a bunch of different metaphors to describe what’s accomplished by the crucifixion of Jesus. One of those metaphors is that Jesus is a sacrificial lamb, like the animals sacrificed in the ritual practices of the Old Testament. The idea behind the sacrificial system was that the animal was an offering to make it up to God when you’ve done something wrong, to set things right and get back in God’s good graces. Even within the Old Testament, long before Jesus, we see the prophets saying, This isn’t working! You can’t just keep doing whatever you want and then sacrificing an animal to fix it; you’re supposed to actually live in God’s ways of justice, mercy and peace!… 

But Christianity gave the sacrificial system a new lease on life, in what’s called the penal substitutionary atonement theory of Jesus’ death. 

By this theory, humanity had messed up SO BADLY that no amount of animal sacrifice could set things right. But if God punished us directly for our overwhelming sinfulness, we’d be collectively wiped off the face of the earth. So God had to send God’s only son, Jesus, to die on the cross in our place, as the ultimate sacrifice, to buy off God’s rightful anger at the human race. This understanding gained dominance in the Middle Ages and beyond – probably because making people feel ashamed and unworthy and bad is a good tool for institutional control. It’s an interpretation, not inherent in the Gospels. An angry, punitive God is not the only way to try to understand Jesus’ death on the cross. I think that’s important for us to know. 

And that’s why Bonhoeffer’s idea about human solidarity with God caught my attention. A suffering God who needs us to stand with him is very different from an angry God who wants to smite us. And it’s different, too, from what I have preached and heard others preach: that in the life of Jesus, and especially on Good Friday, God stands in solidarity with humanity in our suffering. 

So I went looking to learn a little more about what Bonhoeffer meant. I learned that the core idea here comes from a poem he wrote. Here’s part of it:  

“People go to God when they’re in need, 

Pray for help, ask for peace and for bread, 

for rescue from their sickness, guilt and death.

So do they all, all, Christians and heathens… 

People go to God when God’s in need,

find God poor, reviled, without shelter or bread,

see God devoured by sin, weakness, and death.

Christians stand by God in God’s own pain.”

Christians stand by God in God’s own pain. When God’s in need. 

It’s a strange, surprising idea for me, but compelling. 

I learned that Bonhoeffer wrote this poem while he was in prison, awaiting execution. Things were exceptionally heavy and bleak. In letters written to his dear friend Eberhard Bethge, from the same season, Bonhoeffer laid out the idea of religious versus non-religious Christianity. Religious Christianity, as he explained it, was based on “the certain belief in a strong God, a stop-gap-God, recognised (and often greedily desired) precisely in view of his ‘all-solving’ power.” That description comes from theologian Deborah Sutera. Public theologian Tripp Fuller explains the same idea this way: “In our culture of quick fixes, technological solutions, and scientific explanations, we’ve created a “God of the gaps”—a divine problem-solver who exists primarily to intervene when human ability fails. Bonhoeffer saw this deus ex machina as religious wishful thinking, not authentic faith.”

In prison, alone, facing death, burdened by the immeasurable suffering of the world, Bonhoeffer found faith in God as divine fixer not just unsastifying or implausible, but dangerous. That God sounded too much like the Führer’s promises to be a strong leader who would solve everyone’s problems and sort out the worthy from the unworthy. (Similarly, German theologian Karl Barth wrote about his distaste for calling God “Almighty” – because Almighty is how Hitler wanted to be seen.)

Sutera writes, “Non-religious Christianity, on the contrary, lets man make the shocking discovery: his God is a [powerless] God. According to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian is called upon to [take on his own responsibility and agency] by letting the image of an all-powerful and resolving God collapse. It is precisely through his powerlessness that this God comes to place himself within human history and at the centre of earthly life. A fragile God, … a shattered God: yet a braver God, it seems.” Bonhoeffer wrote, “The Bible directs people toward the powerlessness and the suffering of God; only the suffering God can help.”

I find this idea of God’s need, God’s powerlessness, both moving and uncomfortable. Yet isn’t it exactly what we encounter on Good Friday? God helpless on the cross. God dying. God dead. 

Someone asked me recently, What are we doing trying to follow Jesus, when this is where it leads? …  I didn’t have an easy answer. But this late work of Bonhoeffer’s might be part of one. 

It’s not that Bonhoeffer has no sense of God as active, as saving;  but he does see human response and responsibility as a crucial part of how God acts in the world. Elsewhere in his prison letters he writes, “I believe that God can and will let good come out of everything, even the greatest evil. For that to happen, God needs human beings who let everything work out for the best… I believe that in every moment of distress God will give us as much strength to resist as we need. But it is not given to us in advance, lest we rely on ourselves and not on God alone…. I believe that God is no timeless fate but waits for and responds to sincere prayer and responsible actions.” 

But though Bonhoeffer believes in a God who can bring good out of evil, it seems that in his own moments of deep distress, what was paradoxically most comforting was to know God powerless, weak, suffering – like us, with us, as us. He reflects on the similarities between Christ’s suffering and his own when he writes, “It is immensely easier to suffer in obedience to a human command than to suffer in the freedom of one’s own responsible deed. It is immensely easier to suffer with others than to suffer alone. It is immensely easier to suffer openly and honorably than apart and in shame. It is immensely easier to suffer through commitment of the physical self than in the spirit. Christ suffered in freedom, alone, apart and in shame, in body and spirit; and since then, many Christians have so suffered with him.”

Sutera sums up Bonhoeffer’s thinking about the strange grace of encountering the powerless God: “Those who experience physical pain, psychic discomfort and their own human frailty often perceive God as powerless [or] absent… But it is precisely through this passivity and radical powerlessness that God makes himself unspeakably close to the man and woman walking in the dark night of pain…. The God with us is the God who abandons us and who in this abandonment is viscerally close: he is the God who suffers at the centre of human history… This same God, even in… complete powerlessness, can cross the darkness side by side with the man and woman immersed in the night.” In Bonhoeffer’s words, “God is the beyond in the midst of our lives.”

Meeting God in deep suffering – in shared suffering – makes faith a call into the world, not away from it. In these late writings Bonhoeffer says that it’s important to live a “profound this-worldliness” – writing, “By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane.” Dwelling deeply in this world, present to both our own struggles and those of others around us – for Bonhoeffer, this is what it means to be a Christian, and a human. This is what it means to stand by God in God’s need.

The apostle Paul writes that the cross is foolishness to many – but to us who are being saved, it is the power and wisdom of God. 

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? 

God suffering. Alone. Afraid. Mocked. Abused. Dying. Dead. 

God powerless and in need. 

God abandoned by God. 

Our friend, our companion, and our hope. 

 

 

SOURCES

Deborah Sutera: 

https://unipub.uni-graz.at/download/pdf/10671501.pdf

Rudolf Von Sinner: 

https://scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2413-94672016000200006

Tripp Fuller: 

https://processthis.substack.com/p/standing-with-god-in-gethsemanes-7c4