April 20, 2014
FROM THE ARCHIVES: ABANDONMENT ISSUES:
Could God Abandon Christ?: Jesus' cry from the cross means that the Father is to be found when all traces of power are absent. (Stanley Hauerwas, March 2005, BeliefNet)
We do not want Jesus to be abandoned because we do not want to acknowledge that the one who abandons and is abandoned is God. We seek to "explain" these words of dereliction, to save and protect God from making a fool out of being God, but our attempts to protect God reveal how frightening we find a God who refuses to save us by violence.
God is most revealed when he seems to us the most hidden. "Christ's moment of most absolute particularity-the absolute dereliction of the cross-is the moment in which the glory of God, his power to be where and when he will be, is displayed before the eyes of the world," says David Bentley Hart. Here God in Christ refuses to let our sin determine our relation to him. God's love for us means he can hate only that which alienates his creatures from the love manifest in our creation. Cyril of Jerusalem observes that by calling on his Father as "my God," Christ does so on our behalf and in our place. Hear these words, "My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?" and know that the Son of God has taken our place, become for us the abandonment our sin produces, so that we may live confident that the world has been redeemed by this cross.
So redeemed, any account of the cross that suggests God must somehow satisfy an abstract theory of justice by sacrificing his Son on our behalf is clearly wrong. Indeed such accounts are dangerously wrong. The Father's sacrifice of the Son and the Son's willing sacrifice is God's justice. Just as there is no God who is not the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so there is no god who must be satisfied that we might be spared. We are the spared because God refuses to have us lost.
[originally posted: 4/04/10]
Posted by oj at April 20, 2014 12:52 AM
Tweet