Tag: The Crucified God

No Right to Forgive, Part Five: To Endure the Cross

Growing up, my family attended a Lutheran church, of the Missouri Synod branch. I went through confirmation in this church, and got my first memorable church experiences there. My love for Scripture and theology was first kindled there, I think, even as in later years I rejected the faith and church. One thing I remember hearing – I don’t know from who, perhaps our pastor, or a youth leader – was that one of the ways we were different from the dreaded Roman Catholics was that our crosses at the front of the sanctuary didn’t include a replica of Jesus’ broken, bleeding body. The Catholic practice of this was morbid, and frankly not really very appropriate for a church. Our unadorned cross was much more acceptable, and was the proper way to represent the faith. Crucifixes were idols, in a sense.

I always found this to be odd, and yet also right in some way. I mean, we talked about the crucifixion a lot, and a lot of illustrated Bibles had some image of Jesus on the cross, so it couldn’t be that weird to have a crucifix in the church. But it did seem a little morbid, to have a replica of a dead body, even if it was the body of our Lord about to be resurrected. I filed the thought away, but it stuck with me enough that I still get a little niggle in my head anytime I see a crucifix. Is death really how we want to present our faith, the little voice whispers? It’s not exactly the best marketing strategy.

“The death of Jesus on the cross is the centre of all Christian theology”, writes Jurgen Moltmann in chapter 6 of The Crucified God. Evangelicals want to run past it to the glory of Easter morning. Progressives want to roll the clock back and center the life of Jesus. Both are understandable. But life, while vitally important, was always leading to this moment. And Easter morning doesn’t come without noon on Friday. Christianity is neither a mere set of ethical rules for life, or a gospel of prosperity and joy. Christianity is Christ crucified. The ethics are fulfilled in the willing and suffering death of the Servant. The glory is made manifest in the weakness and the godforsakenness. As Karl Barth reminds us, all of history points to the cross.

We’ve spent this week thinking about the reality of human suffering, and what that reality means for our understanding of who God is and what God is like. We cannot begin to answer those questions without the cross. I’ve told you multiple times this week that I won’t be giving you any firm answers or resolution to the problem of theodicy. I’m sticking to that promise. But, in Christian theology, everything points to the cross, as the measure of reality and the fulfillment of history. We can’t really answer the question of why suffering exists. But we can look at the cross to help us see what it means for God.

Moltmann also writes, quoting the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, “The death of Jesus is a statement of God about himself.” Read that sentence again, and make sure you get all the words in the right order. The grammar is crucial. It’s easy to skim over such a sentence, reading it as “the death of Jesus is a statement about God himself,” as if we are using the death of Jesus on the cross to explain the nature of God. While we do that later on, the starting point of our work is to recognize what is really being said here: before we can make inferences about God from our meditation on the Crucifixion, we must recognize that God is making a statement first about God’s own self in the death of Jesus on the cross. Before we can speak, God must speak first, and our response must take this speaking into account. The cross isn’t just something that happened to God; the cross is God speaking to us, revealing God’s own self.

Remember what the protest atheist taught us yesterday? A god who cannot suffer and cannot even die is a very poor being. It’s a powerful condemnation of classical theism, the concept of an all-knowing, all-powerful, immutable God. But what God tells us on the cross is that God is not immutable or immovable. God on the cross is telling us, to quote Paul, that God in the form of Christ “emptied himself…humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” In that moment – and always – God was and is willing to empty God’s self of power and glory, and to suffer and to die, to experience how it feels to be abandoned and to not know what the next moment will bring. This is what God tells us through the cross. God is far from an unmoved mover, and loveless beloved. God doesn’t cherish omniscience and omnipotence above all else. No, far from it.

More from Moltmann: 

“When the crucified Jesus is called the ‘image of the invisible God’, the meaning is that this is God, and God is like this. God is not greater than he is in this humiliation. God is not more glorious than he is in this self-surrender. God is not more powerful than he is in this helplessness. God is not more divine than he is in this humanity.”

In the face of the theist and the atheist, we must point to that morbid and foolish and shocking crucifix, and insist, this is what God is like. You all are worshiping and arguing with a god that is no god at all, but is instead a dim facsimile of humanity itself. The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob is the still, small voice of Elijah. Blessed are the meek, said Jesus, for they shall inherit God’s earth. 

This week, we have contemplated the krisis of the church, and the anguish of Ivan Karamazov. Why do we suffer, we ask again and again? It’s the question I bump up against all the time. Why is Gaza happening? Where was God in Auschwitz? What kind of justice is a justice that just allows these things to happen, only ever reacting, never proactive?

The church isn’t completely empty of answers about this. We are the hands and feet of Christ, we are reminded. We see injustice in the world, and we are called to respond. But that doesn’t get at the root of the problem. Why is it on us to solve God’s mess? God set this all in motion. Why are we on the hook? To go back to our protest atheism, why should we put up with this? Why stick around? Can we not turn in our ticket and say no, thank you?

I have some thoughts about the why questions. One day I’ll write more about those things here. I want to explore very soon the story we tell about God and the theological concept of justification, as laid out by Paul. Both of those series will touch on the whys. And I also want to spend some time grappling with process theology, a strand of thinking that I have a love-hate relationship with. There, too, we will approach the whys. But for now, because it is Good Friday, and the darkness overcomes us at the noon hour, as we prepare to hold vigil before the tomb, I don’t think this is really the time to be looking for that kind of hope. We must sit in the darkness and anguish of Friday before we can get to Easter morning.

I named this series after a line from that Dostoevsky quote we started the series with. “She has no right to forgive him,” Ivan declares of the mother who lost her child. This violence, and her suffering, deserve anguish and anger and hate. We cannot forgive such acts. We very rarely do.

We should say those words to Jesus on the cross too. You have no right to forgive your murderers. We have a share in this moment on this cross, and what an utter betrayal it is to be deprived of you, O Lord, and yet you still extend forgiveness. What right do you have?

We don’t comprehend the shocking nature of this act of forgiveness, I think. We are two thousand years on from it, and it is such a common part of the story, it has lost its ability to scandalize our sense of justice. Jesus has just been subjected to the most cruel torture and mockery, and is now being killed in the one of the most humiliating and painful ways humanity has come up with. Who in their right mind forgives in that moment? Could you? 

We have no right to forgive these things we’ve had done to us. We have no right to be forgiven.. But we do have an obligation. Forgiveness is a non-negotiable. Those aren’t comforting words to whisper to the grieving mother. Ivan is right to nurture her anger and her hurt. But as a people, we Christians are called to find forgiveness, especially in the hardest moments. Not forgetfulness. Not without repentance. Not with a requirement of immediate and full reconciliation. But we do have to figure out this forgiving thing, together.

Only through the cruciform suffering love that forgiveness is motivated by do we undo the violence that leads to the cross. Jesus showed us that we defuse that kind of hate by loving, radically and wastefully and abundantly, by practicing grace. This is where we gain a glimpse of what God is all about.

Where I want to end is with Martin Luther. Moltmann, at the beginning of his section on theism (which we covered in part three), spends some time engaging Luther as a refutation of pure natural theology. Natural theology is the idea that God can be known solely from human experience or perception of the world. This is in contrast to revelation, which is the knowledge of God obtained through something like Scripture, or the actual words of God. Moltmann is not Barth, and doesn’t throughout his works wholly reject natural theology, but he does here show that he places a particular importance on the cross as divine revelation of God’s nature.

Martin Luther

Moltmann writes that Luther used the cross as “a new principle of theological epistemology”, which is a theological way of say that the cross, rather than just being a vehicle for contemplating vicarious suffering as a spiritual practice, is instead the ground for all knowledge of God. The cross, in this sense, becomes what we have been describing above: the center and the source of all God-talk. We cannot understand the Hebrew Scriptures, the like of Christ, Easter and Pentecost, the Epistles, all of human history, without understanding the cross as the crux of it all. 

For Moltmann, this reading of Luther is key to overcoming the classical theism that infects the church. Let me quote and unpack a particularly dense section of Moltmann to illustrate this further:

“For Luther understands the cross of Christ in a quite unmystical way as God’s protest against the misuse of his name for the purpose of a religious consummation of human wisdom, human works and the Christian imperialism of medieval ecclesiastical society.”

What he is saying here is that Luther viewed the cross as, like we said above, a statement of God about God, which works to undo the ways humanity appropriates the name of God to justify ungodly things like imperialism, violence, nationalism, and other Power and Principalities. A theistic God, steeped in glory and power, becomes a justification for all manner of sin. But the cross as the standard of the divine posits a wholly different God, one who becomes powerful in weakness, to quote Paul. This is the only true God, the one on the cross. “Christ the crucified alone is ‘man’s true theology and knowledge of God.’”

This is the key insight of Moltmann’s The Crucified God. God is first and foremost, primarily, found on the cross, on Friday, in Golgotha. If we truly want to know what God is like, we must not remove Christ from our crucifixes but truly contemplate him there, in his humiliation and vulnerability and death. All other knowledge of God – everything written in Scripture, Old and New, all the words of theology and devotion and praise and hymnody and evangelism – it all must conform to Christ crucified, or it is no word about God at all. 

This is not an easy word. Cruciform Christianity is a hard word. As Moltmann writes, “To know God means to endure God. To know God in the cross of Christ is a crucifying form of knowledge, because it shatters everything to which a man can hold and on which he can build, both his works and his knowledge of reality, and precisely in so doing sets him free.” This gets at our on-going question about the presence of suffering. I still don’t have any answers for you. I’m not even willing to disavow the righteous protest of Ivan and protest atheism; I’m inclined to affirm it, to rage against God. But the cross is a convicting moment for all of us. We don’t know why suffering exists. But what we do know is that God emptied God’s own self of all power and glory and might, and took the form of a human being, and died a cruel and humiliating death, in the desire to ensure for us an eternal life in Christ. We cannot dismiss that action, anymore than we can dismiss the suffering of the world. It is all there in the cross, and as Moltmann says, it is something we must endure.

I said at the beginning of this series that none of this may be satisfying. It may not be. That’s ok. Its Friday. Christ’s body is on the cross, and he is dead. Today, we weep, and our hope flees our souls. Sunday morning is a long way away. 

Job replied:

“I’m not letting up—I’m standing my ground.
    My complaint is legitimate.
God has no right to treat me like this—
    it isn’t fair!
If I knew where on earth to find him,
    I’d go straight to him.
I’d lay my case before him face-to-face,
    give him all my arguments firsthand.
I’d find out exactly what he’s thinking,
    discover what’s going on in his head.
Do you think he’d dismiss me or bully me?
    No, he’d take me seriously.

Job 23:1-7, The Message translation

No Right to Forgive, Part Four: A Poor and Arrogant God

The section of chapter 6 of Jurgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God, titled “The Theology of the Cross and Atheism”, has probably influenced my thinking on theological matters more than any other piece of writing. My take on theology is invariably grounded in the idea of a God who can – who did! – suffer and die. The critiques of the traditional theistic concept of God contained in this section are massively influential on how think about who God is and who God isn’t. So, as I’ve been developing this series of essays, they have all be inevitably pointing towards this particular one. The work has been figuring out how the rest of the first half of the chapter gets us to this point, and what these words are set up to do.

Tomorrow’s essay, the closing one of this series, will actually take us backwards in the text. As I’ve stated a couple of times before, what I explicitly did not want to do over the course of these essays was try to come to some form of answer to the question of why God allows suffering in the world. I find myself too often drawn to declarative statements of theology, to the detriment of doing theology as a questioning and perhaps even apophatic task. I hope I’ve corrected that tendency this week (even if yesterday’s essay shaded a little too far into firm answers.) Tomorrow, while hopefully we’ll point towards some understanding of the problem of theodicy, we won’t be seeking firm answers. We’ll be moving backwards in the chapter merely to reflect on what a Crucified God means for us.

This section of the chapter lends itself very well to merely asking questions, especially accusatory ones. After leading us through the extended critique of theistic notions of God, Moltmann is ready to turn to what he calls protest atheism. Protest atheism is defined in this chapter by anguish and righteous indignation present in the Dostoevsky quote from The Brothers Karamazov that we started this essay series with:

And what sort of harmony is it, if there is a hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don’t want any more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go up to make up the sum of sufferings which is necessary for the purchase of truth, then I say beforehand that the entire truth is not worth such a price. I do not want a mother to embrace the torturer who had her child torn to pieces by dogs. She has no right to forgive him. And if that is so, if she has no right to forgive him, what becomes of harmony? I don’t want harmony. I don’t want it out of the love I bear to mankind. I want to remain with my suffering unavenged. Besides, too high a price has been placed on harmony. We cannot afford to pay so much for admission. And indeed, if I am an honest man, I’m bound to hand it back as soon as possible. This I am doing. It is not God that I do not accept, Alyosha. I merely more respectfully return him the ticket. I accept God, understand that, but I cannot accept the world he has made.

Ivan Karamazov, in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The theistic form of God breaks down in the face of questions like this. The Unmoved Mover can provide no better answer to Ivan than “Because I made it to be so.” Some, in the face of the glory of the Divine, may accept this as an adequate answer, that one we must simply lay down in front of because of our very smallness. But, I think all humans, deep in the depths of their souls, know this to be inadequate. We demand more of God, because we sense God to be something more. We see the hurts and the suffering, and we too feel compelled to return our tickets.

Protest atheism that arises from such feelings is not classical atheism, which is simply the rejection of the existence of God. Moltmann says that, for protest atheism, “the question of the existence of God is, in itself, a minor issue in the face of the question of his righteousness in the world.” When we demand to know why God allows such things to happen, we are not questioning the existence of God; the question itself presumes the existence itself! Instead, we are asking: how can such a God be worthy of worship and allegiance? How can we stand the fact that God allows such suffering to persist, if God is all-powerful?

The answers classic theism posits concerning the glory of God and our inadequacy in questioning the Divine again throws up more problems than solutions. Here is Moltmann again (apologies in advance, because I’ll be doing a lot of quoting in this essay):

“And this question of suffering and revolt is not answered by any cosmological argument for the existence of God or any theism, but is rather provoked by both of these…for there is something that the atheist fears over and above all torments. That is the indifference of God and his final retreat from the world of men.” Protest atheists are not arguing against the existence of God; we all want a loving, benevolent and good God to exist. But they, and we, look around at the state of the world – we look at the little child in Ivan’s story – and we only see indifference and absence reflected back at us. No wonder nihilism has absorbed modernity! How could it not in the wake of Aushwitz and Hiroshima, of My Lai and Abu Ghraib, of Ukraine and Myanmar and Gaza and the Uyghurs? A God who is simply unmoved and unchanged is wholly inadequate to the world that that God is said to have created. To not be moved by the world is to not be dead. Wanting a loving God is fine; but how can a loving God who controls all simply sit by and allow things to exist as they do?

I want to take a stab one more time at the core of what is wrong with this traditional theistic God worshiped in so many churches today. Because I’ve been slightly unfair, to simply paint this God as the Unmoved Mover. I don’t think any church actually worships Aristotle’s Divine Being. I think the God worshiped in most churches today is actually a profoundly confused being. It has echoes of the Unmoved Mover: it is impassable and immovable and unchanging. But, it also declared to be wrathful and jealous (and thus not impassable), as a simple reading of the Hebrew Scriptures would reveal, but it is a wrath and jealousy that seems to center on the individual choices people make in their daily interpersonal conduct. Yet, this God is also called merciful and overflowing with love, although the nature of that love is seemingly conditional. It is a God that is said to care about all, but it also conceived of as caring about this particular congregation or group or nation or tribe a little bit more than the others. It is a God that wants success for us, and yet takes it away at the slightest whim. This God is a Frankenstein’s monster, concocted of everything we have decided this God needs to be, held together at the seams with a patchwork of Bible verses singled out and glued into place to keep everything from totally collapsing into contingency. This God is not a mystery, but an impossibility and a mirror of our own insecurities and shortcomings.

The thing that this God is not is relatable in any way. I don’t mean that God should be our best friend and close companion. I mean, a God that is merciful and compassionate, loving and just, gracious and righteous, is a God who can hear the cry of Ivan with us, and know what that depth of anguish feels like. This is a God who not only gets angry at suffering, but who knows what it means to suffer, because that distinction is crucial to any understanding of suffering that actually matters. It is a God who can relate to us in our current state, because like us, it doesn’t merely sympathize with the hurting in a merely intellectual and detached sense; like us, it feels it deep in our very Being. We recall moments in our own experience that are analogous; we re-experience that suffering in some way, and in that depth of feeling, we find solidarity with the hurting. From there, our desire to do something arises. No one who truly empathizes with hurt in this way can be unaffected, or completely unwilling to do something. The only God who matters is one who can do the same thing. An impassable, distant, and unmoved God simply doesn’t matter. God might as well be dead.

This understanding that a God who cares about our hurt must be a God who can truly understand it leads to the most important passage in all of The Crucified God. It is important enough that I am going to quote it at length, because it is the most powerful critique of the traditional ideas of God I’ve ever read:

“What kind of a poor being is a God who cannot suffer and cannot even die? He is certainly superior to mortal man so long as this man allows suffering and death to come together as a doom over his head. But he is inferior to man if man grasps this suffering and death as his own possibilities and chooses them himself. Where a mean accepts and choose his own death, he raises himself to a freedom which no animal and no god can have. This was already said by Greek tragedy. For to accept death and to choose it for oneself is a human possibility and only a human possibility. ‘The experience of death is the extra and the advantage that he has over all divine wisdom.’ The peak of metaphysical rebellion against the God who cannot die to therefore freely chosen death, which is called suicide. It is the extreme possibility of protest atheism, because it is only this which makes man his own god, so that the gods become dispensable. But even apart from this extreme position, which Dostoevsky worked through again and again in The Demons, a God who cannot suffer is poorer than any man. For a God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be involved. Suffering and injustice do not affect him. And because he is so completely insensitive, he cannot be affected or shaken by anything. He cannot weep, for he has no tears. But the one who cannot suffering cannot love either So he is also a loveless being. Aristotle’s God cannot love; he can only be loved by all non-divine beings by virtue of his perfection and beauty, and in this way draw them to him. The ‘unmoved Mover’ is a ‘loveless Beloved’. If he is the ground of the love (eros) of all things for him (causa prima), and at the same time his own cause (causa sui), he is the beloved who is in love with himself; a Narcissus in a metaphysical degree: Deus incurvatus in se. But a man can suffer because he can love, even as a Narcissus, and he always suffers only to the degree that he loves. If he kills all love in himself, he no longer suffers. He becomes apathetic. But in that case is he a God? Is he not rather a stone?

Finally, a God who is only omnipotent is in himself an incomplete being, for he cannot experience helplessness and powerlessness. Omnipotence can indeed be longed for and worshipped by helpless men, but omnipotence is never loved; it is only feared. What sort of being, then, would be a God who is only ‘almighty’? He would rather be a being without experience, a being without destiny and a being who is loved by no one. A man who experiences helplessness, a man who suffers because he loves, a man who can die, is therefore a richer being than an omnipotent God who cannot suffer, cannot love and cannot die. Therefore for a man who is aware of the riches of his own nature in his love, his suffering, his protest and his freedom, such a God ia not a necessary and supreme being, but a highly indispensable and superfluous being.”

While there is so much theological richness throughout this passage, that last line is key point of everything we’ve done in these last two essays. We don’t live in the pre-modern age anymore. Our God must be able to answer the things we know to be true about the universe. Human beings, through our God-given faculties of logic and science and intelligence, have deduced much about the nature of the universe, enough that mere wonder at it all is no longer the primary human experience of nature. Wonder still exists, certainly. But we know why and how things happen, and so the role of God as simply the initiator of the unknown and majestic is behind us now. We need a God who not only made things, but who can answer for them, in a way that is better than, “Because I said so.” Let us not skip over the majesty declared by God in his answer to Job, and let us not fail to acknowledge our limited understanding of things, even in a scientific world. But let us not also be condescended to by an arrogant and inhumane God. The Scriptures grant humanity more dignity than that. God cannot simply handwave away our concerns with a light and magic show. Protest atheism is just that – a protest. God must answer.

This is the problem of the theistic God. That God is arrogant in the face of our suffering. And we cannot accept that, when we know our God is loving and humble and merciful and gracious. So how do we square this circle? Can we countenance a God who can suffer and die, as Moltmann puts it? That is the question we will close with tomorrow: not with a neatly packaged answer, but merely with an attempt to try to see what God is like, as a starting point for our grappling with the suffering of the world.

The Suffering God: Ash Wednesday Reflections on Lent

The season of Lent is one of the most meaningful times of the year for me. I am a lover of the overall rhythms of the church’s liturgical calendar, and I am especially fond of the movement beginning with Ash Wednesday, through the 40 days of Lent, into Holy Week, and finally culminating with Easter. Its a theologically rich time of year, especially for a theologian like myself whose academic work focuses on suffering, both human and Divine.

Lent commemorates Christ’s 40 days in the desert, where he fasted and withstood the Temptations he had to endure at the hands of Satan. Just as Christ sacrificed and meditated on the failings inherent in humanity, so we are called to a practice of sacrifice and contemplation. This time prepares us to walk with Christ through Holy Week, into his Suffering Death and, ultimately, the Resurrection. Scripture tells us many times Christ foreknew his coming fate, and he must have contemplated it during his days in the wilderness. Being human, he surely felt pangs of great sorrow and foreboding, alongside the assurance he felt in the righteousness of his sending.

The Temptations themselves – temptations to wield economic, religious, and political power – serve as reminders of those things which Christians are called to reject. Just as Christ refused the temptations and instead launched a public ministry predicted on humility, compassion and peace, so we are called to remember our Discipleship by refusing to live as usual, as society expects, during this time. And unlike the weak Lenten “fasting” practiced by much of popular Christianity, this isn’t a call to simply shed the trappings of the world for 40 days, followed by a post-Easter return to life as it was. No, Lent is to be a time set aside for reflection and contemplation on the kind of life we are called to at all times by Christ, the kind of life demanded by the self-sacrificial love of Christ envisioned at the end of these days by Christ’s suffering and death. These forty days are our time to remember our calling as disciples, and to re-dedicate ourselves to that way of being.

Fasting does have its place, however. For Western Christians, we can look to our Eastern brothers and sisters, who engage in a much more committed practice, where not only are diets restricted, but intense study of Scripture and the Church Fathers is accompanied by intensified prayers and spiritual exercises, as well as more time spent in and with the Church. All of this serves to preoccupy the disciple, reminding them of the overwhelming call on their lives made by Christ. We in the West, especially here in America, would be well served to pattern our own observance on these more ancient and more meaningful practices. I certainly hope to do so this year, and in future Lents.

As I mentioned earlier, Lent is a time that I feel especially called to, as a theologian who has spent much time thinking about the nature of human suffering, and the shocking reality of God’s own suffering. Christ suffered from the pangs of hunger for forty long days, not to mention the pangs of temptation he felt. We end this time in the liturgical year by observing and mourning the suffering death Christ endured, as we try to make sense of it for our own lives and our world, before we get to the beauty of Easter morning. The suffering God endured as Christ is central to our understanding of who God is. Our God is a God who suffers alongside us, who can relate to our limited existence because They have experienced it. The suffering of God on the Cross through Christ the man opens up new paths of relationality for us to have with the Divine. Lent is the time when, through voluntary self-abnegation, we ruminate on our limits, and the amazing fact that God emptied God’s self to take on those same limitations, and ultimately, even death.

Lent is my favorite time of year to revisit one of the most important books in my life of faith, The Crucified God by Jurgen Moltmann. In particular, I am drawn to my favorite passage of the book over and over again (which I will quote in full; emphasis all mine):

What kind of a poor being is a God who cannot suffer and cannot even die? He is certainly superior to mortal man so long as this man allows suffering and death to come together as doom over his head. But he is inferior to man if man grasps this suffering and death as his own possibilities and chooses them himself. Where a man accepts and chooses his own death, he raises himself to a freedom which no animal and no god can have.

…a God who cannot suffer is poorer than any man. For a God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be involved. Suffering and injustice do not affect him. And because he is so completely insensitive, he cannot be affected or shaken by anything. He cannot weep, for he has no tears. But the one who cannot suffer cannot love either. So he is also a loveless being. Aristotle’s God cannot love; he can only be loved by all non-divine beings by virtue of his perfection and beauty, and in this way draw them to him. The ‘unmoved Mover’ is a ‘loveless Beloved.’

[…]

Finally, a God who is only omnipotent is in himself an incomplete being, for he cannot experience helplessness and powerlessness. Omnipotence can indeed be longed for an worshipped by helpless men, but omnipotence is never loved, it is only feared. Wha sort of being, them, would be a God who was only ‘almighty’? He would be a being without experience, a being without destiny and a being who is loved by no one. A man who experiences helplessness, a man who suffers because he loves, a man who can die, is therefore richer than an omnipotent God who cannot suffer, cannot love and cannot die. Therefore a man who is aware of the riches of his own nature in his love, his suffering, his protest and his freedom, such a God is not a necessary and supreme being, but a highly disposable and superfluous being.

[…]

The only way past protest atheism is through a theology of the cross which understands God as the suffering God in the suffering of Christ and which cries out with the godforsaken God, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ For this theology, God and suffering are no longer contradictions, as in theism and atheism, but God’s being is in suffering and the suffering is in God’s being itself, because God is love.

Today is the day we take the ashes, in remembrance of our own mortality and impending death, but also in the hope that the love of God has overcome that death. God was able to do this through taking on willingly that death, out of love, and thus to show death impotence in the face of what really matters. So, let us remember, as we enter this season of denial, suffering and sacrifice, that through it all, we are called to love one another in a new and radical way, as God loves, not because it is a duty, but because we can know what it means to love and be loved.