Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 20, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It can’t be! I mean, how could it happen? Just five days earlier the crowds hailed him as the one who comes in the name of the Lord. They reenacted a prophetic scene from their Scripture in a way that proclaimed him king and Messiah. All week they crowded round to hear his teachings. They adored him. Then their leaders denounced him, and the Roman occupiers arrested him. He was flogged and then executed as a common political rabble rouser. We can see how the Romans could crucify a common political rebel. They did it all the time. It’s one of the major ways they maintained their vaunted Pax Romana, the Roman Peace, through oppression and legalized terror. But this wasn’t just another political troublemaker. This was Jesus, the Son of God Incarnate. This wasn’t supposed to happen to Him! He was God! You can’t crucify God, can you?

That is one of the central questions of the questions of the Christian faith, and we want to answer it No! Of course you can’t crucify God. God is omnipotent, all powerful, right? No earthly power could possibly overcome God’s power and crucify God. Besides, God is Spirit, not a body. You can crucify a man, but you can’t crucify Spirit. Be honest now. Isn’t that how you think of it? When you see Jesus nailed on that cross, do you really see God being crucified? I don’t, or at least I didn’t use to.

And yet, that is what the Christian story says, isn’t it? We say, with the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.. God became flesh and dwelt among us. True, we say in Trinitarian terms that it was God the Son who became incarnate, and we say that God is Father and Holy Spirit as well as Son; but we also say that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God. So it won’t really do to say the Son was crucified but God wasn’t. The Son, after all, is God. The more I live with and work with these questions in my preaching, my teaching, and my pastoral work here week after week the more convinced I become that the truly Christian answer to the question of whether God was crucified on the cross of Jesus is yes. As Christians, we worship a crucified God. If, as we profess, Jesus was God Incarnate, and if, as we know, Jesus was crucified, then we have to say: God was crucified on the cross of Jesus.

Now, I just presented you with a logical impossibility, right? God is omnipotent, One whom no earthly power could overcome, and the Roman Empire, a very earthly power, crucified that God. That’s a contradiction, right? It can’t be, can it. And yet it is, and so we are faced with the need for an explanation of how God could be crucified. The answer, I am becoming more and more convinced all the time, lies in the passage we heard from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. That passage is known as the kenosis hymn. Kenosis is a Greek word that means "emptying." In Christian theology, kenosis is the idea that in becoming human in the person of Jesus Christ, God-specifically God the Son-gave up being God. The Son "emptied" himself of divinity and became truly human. That’s how the Romans could crucify him. He was God, but he gave up being God and became a weak, mortal human just like us.

But now we have another problem don’t we? We just said that in Christ Jesus God the Son gave up being God, but we Christians also say that for all that he was God, God Incarnate. I’ve believed for a long time, and I still do, that you can sum up a lot of what Christianity is about by saying: "If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus." Scripture agrees, calling Christ "the image of God." 2 Corinthians 4:4 How can he be the image of God if he has emptied himself of divinity? It doesn’t make sense, does it?

Well, yes it does, but to make it make sense we need to go back to our Philippians passage about the Son emptying Himself and try to get a deeper understanding of what it’s about. Paul says that Christ Jesus, being in the form of God, "did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself...." To understand what Paul is saying we need to understand what he meant, or thought his listeners would understand, by the word God.

The ancient Greek world in which Paul lived and preached had a very clear image of God. To the Greek philosophers, to be divine, to be God, meant to have apatheia, a Greek word that is the root of our word apathy. In this view, true God must be immutable, unmoved, without pathos, without emotions, without feelings. In this view, God may in some sense be omnipotent, but God is not involved in creation. God is an abstract perfection beyond the realm of human passions and human suffering.

Paul’s kenosis hymn that we heard this morning is telling his Greek audience that the Christian God isn’t like that. If this God ever was like that, God has gotten over it. Paul uses the image of emptying to convey this idea of God getting over being God, or at least getting over being what people think God should be. To put the same thing slightly differently, God in Christ does not relate to use as uninvolved and without passions or emotions. Rather, God relates to us the way we see God relating to us in Jesus Christ. In Christ, the Son emptied of divinity and become human, God relates to us as one of us.

Now, Paul’s hymn is specifically about Christ the Son of God, and it’s probably pretty easy for us to see Christ the Son of God relating to us as one of us. But what about the one Jesus called Father and that we know in Trinitarian terms as God the Father? Can’t the Son in Christ relate to us with human passions and emotions while God the Father remains the transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient God of classical theistic thought? A lot of Christians think of God that way, but I am convinced that the truly Christian answer to that question about the nature of God the Father, or how God the Father relates to us, has to be no. God the Father does not remain the unmoved and unchanging God of classical theism while God the Son experiences human emotions, human suffering, and human death. If that were true, Jesus Christ could not really be the image of God, as Paul insists that he is. Moreover, if that were true, we would have not one God but two. In Trinitarianism, we speak of God in three persons, but God is still one. If what we say about Jesus Christ is true, then God is not, indeed no part of God is, that transcendent, omnipotent, immutable unmoved mover of classical Greek, and for that matter classical Christian, thought. Rather, God really is what we see God to be in Jesus Christ, and specifically what we see God to be in Jesus hanging on the cross.

And who is that God? That God is a God who above all else exists in solidarity with God’s beloved creatures, with us humans, in every aspect of our lives as God’s creatures. That’s what the cross of Jesus is all about. On that cross, God enters into human suffering and death and endures them in God’s own person. God experiences in God’s own person what it is not to be God, to be emptied of Divinity, and to suffer and die like one of us mortal humans. On the cross of Jesus God takes all of that into God’s own being. They become part of God’s own experience, part of God’s own existence. On the cross of Jesus, human suffering and death become part of who God is, and God becomes part of human suffering and death.

Now, maybe that doesn’t make a lot of sense to you. I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense to me. To be honest, I’m still working out what all of what it means. I can, however, tell you at least this much with certainty. Because of the cross of Jesus, I know that when we humans suffer and when we humans die, we do not do it alone. In the book of Acts we read that God is the One in whom we live and move and have our being. Acts 17:28 Because of the cross of Jesus I know that we not only live and have our being in God but we also die and have our non-being, the end of our being, in God. God sustains us in happiness and in life, and because of the cross of Jesus I know that God also sustains us in misery, suffering, and death.

I recently read my spiritual guru in print Douglas John Hall responding to the charge that his theology of the cross, which is what I’ve been giving you here this morning (and lots of mornings, actually) has a kind of gloomy preoccupation with suffering and death. His response was: Maybe, but then there is an awful lot of suffering and death in this world. We’re real good at not seeing it most of the time, but if we’re honest we have to concede that it’s true. There is a lot of suffering and death in the world. Suffering and death are part of what it means to be human. So I have no interest in a faith that speaks only of joy and resurrection. I need a faith that helps me deal with suffering and crucifixion too.

That’s what I get from faith in the crucified God. The crucified God takes the worst the world can give-sin, injustice, betrayal, innocent suffering, and undeserved death-into God’s own being and reveals to us that even those things take place in God. That means that no matter what may happen to us in this world, no matter how we may stray from God’s ways, no matter how we may suffer from illness or injury, no matter how we may die, we are never separated from God. It’s easier perhaps to see the good times taking place in God, but to be blunt about it I don’t really need God in the good times. I can give God thanks for the good times, but there’s no issue there that I really need God for. I need a God for the bad times. I need a God for the Good Fridays of my life, and I think you need that God too. I need a crucified God because I need to know that God is with me no matter what. I need a crucified God because I need to know that when I die God will still be there. And our God, the crucified God, hasn’t just told us God is there on our Good Fridays, our crucified God has proved it, has demonstrated it by actually doing it in the person of Jesus.

It’s easy to think of Easter as good news, and it is. But Good Friday comes first. There is no Easter without Good Friday. Easter is good news, but if anything Good Friday is better news. Many of you know that my favorite Bible verse is Romans 8:38-39, where Paul says that nothing in all creation, and not even death, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Good Friday, the day when we commemorate the crucifixion of God, is how we know that that is true. The crucified God is with us, holding us, loving us, and never abandoning us no matter what. Thanks be to God. Amen.