A Paper Written for Thinking Theologically, Confessing Publicly
Luther Seminary, Professor Lois Malcolm, Fall 2017
In “The Crucified
God,” Jurgen Moltmann writes that there can be no suffering which has not been
God’s suffering, no death which has not been God’s death, and no life, no
fortune, and no joy which have not been integrated into eternal life, the
eternal joy of God.[1] When confronted with the question “who do you
say that I am?” with which Jesus confronts Peter in Mark 8:29, this vision of
the crucified, suffering, yet ecstatically joyful God is, for me, an answer that
integrates the paradox of intense and abiding joy in tandem with overwhelming sorrow
which invades a life of pastoral leadership.
“To
be a theologian of the cross, one has to learn to see things as they are.”[2] Seeing things as they are in the life of an
individual, community, or world brings a sense of incomprehensible
suffering. Through Jesus, God
communicates that “there is something in God that can develop into suffering.”[3] As we struggle and seek to understand how
God’s promises of love for the world through Jesus are communicated through the
bodies of Jesus Christ’s followers, we must acknowledge and accept that this love
is inextricably intertwined with suffering.
Moltmann called this “The dialectic of human life: we live because and
in so far as we love – and we suffer and die because and in so far as we love. In this way we experience death and life in
love.”[4] When Peter answers Jesus, “You are the
Christ” in Mark 8:29, Jesus’ response to this acknowledgement was to teach of
suffering, both his own (Mark 8:31) and that of his followers. (Mark 8:34) Richard Hayes writes that “to be Jesus’
disciple means to allow one’s own identity to be stamped by the identity of the
one who died forsaken on the cross.”[5] This identity is that of a co-sufferer. “We cannot stand by as idle spectators
speculating about things beyond.”[6] To understand who Jesus is, we must allow the
suffering of individuals, communities, and the world to invade us. As Elaine Crawford in her essay “Womanist
Christology” contends, Jesus is central and co-sufferer with the oppressed, and
“continues to live and identify with the marginated of today.”[7] Walter Kaspar exhorts us to hear in
“compassion” the word “passion,” and says that we are to have a passionate
response to injustice.[8] I would extend this to having a passionate
response to all suffering which fills the human soul and only finds answer at
the foot of the cross – “truly this man was the Son of God.” (Mark 16:39)
The
stark result, then, of Jesus who suffers is Jesus who is crucified. Kaspar writes, “To believe in the crucified
son is to believe that love is present in the world and that it is more
powerful than hate and violence, more powerful than all the evil in which human
beings are entangled.”[9] The crucified Christ is a reality that cannot
“ever simply woven into the seamless metaphysical or ideological tapestry of
time.”[10] Like the veil of the temple, time is torn,
and
“Jesus’ agony lasts until the end
of the world; in fact, it goes right back to the beginning of the world.”[11] Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, shows
all the dichotomies of opposites in the old world resolving into unity in the
new world created by Christ’s crucifixion.
Galatians chapter three describes Jew and Greek, slave and free, male
and female, Jew and Gentile, representing the death of the Law along with the
crucified Christ. J. Louis Martyn claims
that the Galatian church needed to “once again be seized by the apocalypse of
Jesus Christ, the invasive disclosure of the antinomous structure of the New
Creation.”[12] But Christ crucified is not simply an abstract
idea for the world, it is personal. “Jesus’
death is not a substitution for our death, it is our death,”[13]
writes Gerhard Forde, echoing Paul’s words in his letter to the Romans: “Do you
not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been
baptized into his death? Therefore, we
have been buried with him by baptism into death…” (Romans 6:3-4) Luther saw
baptism and the sacraments as ways for us to train ourselves to enter into this
death, becoming one with Christ’s death.
He observed that death takes away all things that are seen and to meet
it, we must have the help of things that are unseen and eternal – “thus, the
sacrament is for us a ford, a bridge, a door, a ship, and a stretcher, by which
and in which we pass from this world into eternal life.”[14] Paul, finishing his thought, leads us to the
same conclusion: “…so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the
glory of the father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6:4)
Within
this newness of life is where the paradox of the ecstatically joyful Christ and
our corresponding abiding joy is found.
Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, we can also say with surety, “I
am in Christ, in him I know myself as a being who is raised above this
sensuous, sinful, and transient world and already belongs to the transcendent;
in him I am assured of resurrection, in him I am a child of God.”[15] Jesus Christ is where we find the joyful expression
of God’s love; not as a poetic metaphor but as an essential definition of God’s
being.[16] Christ’s suffering, our co-suffering, and
Christ’s death within which is our own death, are all representations of the
fullness of this love. We discover our
own “perichoretic union,” as Jurgen Moltmann puts it,[17]
with God as well as the accompanying experience of the joy-filled Christ as we
discover that “Christians do not live in themselves but in Christ and in their
neighbor.”[18]
As Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit,
and God the Creator “exist so intimately with one another, for one another, and
in one another that they constitute a single, unique, and complete unity by
themselves,”[19] we too are invited into
this union with God and with communities of faith. The first epistle of John outlines this kind
of community of faith which lives in abiding joy; saying that we are to love
“not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” (1 John 3:18) We follow a
Lord who gives his own flesh for the life of the world, so that, ultimately,
all creation may be released into full joy and abundant life.
When we answer
“who do you say that I am?” we are not just affirming Jesus’ identity, we are
choosing our own identity as well.[20] Do our identities as followers of Jesus
Christ and God’s promises for the world make a difference in our lives, in the
lives of our neighbors, and in the life of the world? I must persistently say “yes.” The paradox of Christ as suffering, death,
and joy is overwhelmingly present in my life as I explore my identity as a
called pastor, and, in fact, more so in a magnified week of intense suffering,
death, and joy. This week I have experienced Christ’s suffering with
the world as I listened to stories of loss from two of my vocal students; one a
Muslim during a conversation about faith, and the presence of God in her life
as she lived through significant loss of home and cultural identity and sudden,
violent death of friends and family members during the coup in Iran seven years
ago and her subsequent escape; the other a young gay man struggling through
grief both at the death of his father and his own estrangement from the family
church due to rejection as “other” and wondering if there is a place for him
with God. I deeply love these
individuals, and I am also deeply aware that it is not just my love but
Christ’s love for them as he invades my life and heart. They are who I say Jesus is. This week I have experienced Christ’s death
with the world as two significant losses have pierced the heart of my faith
family and circle of close friends. One,
an elderly member of the congregation with whom I have spent considerable time this
semester as I entered into pastoral care just as she entered hospice. She was a complex and beautiful woman of
faith who had led a long life and left a legacy in our faith community. The other, a long-awaited baby to parents who have walked through an agony of infertility,
miscarriages, and finally this complete joy at a pregnancy and little boy –
born a month before term with vascular brain malformations and, three weeks
later, taken off life support this weekend.
The only way a merciful God can answer to the family of an infant that
lives only twelve minutes in his mother’s arms after being removed from medical
support is that God dies with him. He is
who I say Jesus is.
Even so, as this
question moves from the pages of books and into the reality of the broken and
suffering world, I stubbornly answer this question with Moltmann’s
conclusion: I say that Jesus Christ is
deep and abiding joy that looks through this life and into the eternal. This joy in our unity with Christ must be
what drives us as pastoral leaders. It
makes a difference that even as we experience not only our own suffering and
death but that of our neighbors, we continually affirm the goodness and significance
of creation, and through emptying ourselves live God’s promises in Jesus into a
desperate world.
[1] Jürgen
Moltmann, “The ‘Crucified God’,” in his The Crucified God (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1993 [1973]), 227-277 (with notes pp. 278-290). Pg 246
[2] Forde, Gerhard O., and Martin
Luther. On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections On Luther's
Heidelberg Disputation, 1518. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 1997. Pg 50
[3] Balthasar, Hans Urs von. 1988.
Theo-Drama : Theological Dramatic Theory. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Pg 328
[4] Moltmann, pg
253
[5] Hays,
Richard B. 1996. The Moral Vision of the New Testament : Community, Cross, New
Creation : A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics. 1St ed. San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Pg
79
[6]
Forde, Gerhard O. "Seventh Locus: The Work of Christ." In
Christian Dogmatics, Volume 2. Edited by Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson,
5-99. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984 Pg 57
[7] Crawford, A
Elaine. “Womanist Christology: Where Have We Come From and Where Are We Going?’
Review and Expositor 95, no. 3
(1998): 367-382 ATLA Religion Database
with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed
December 18, 2017) Pg 376
[8] Kaspar, Walter.
Mercy. Paulist Press. New Jersey 2013 Pg 17
[9] Kaspar, Pg 82
[10] Forde, Luther
Pg 75
[12]
Martyn, J. Louis. "Apocalyptic Antinomies in Paul's Letters to the
Galatians." In New Testament Studies 31, no. 3 (July 1985): 410-424. Pg 421
[13] Forde, 58
[14] Luther, Martin,
and Theodore Bachmann, Ed. Word and Sacrament.
Fortress Press, Philadelphia. 1960 pg 66
[15] Hultgren, Arland, “Paul as Theologian” in Word & World Vol 30, Issue 4. 2010, Pg 361
[16] Johnson, Elizabeth A. "Redeeming the Name of
Christ: Christology" in Freeing Theology, HarperSanFrancisco, 1993 Pg 147
[17]
Moltmann, Jürgen. "Perichoresis: And Old Magic Word for a New
Trinitarian Theology." In Trinity, Community, and Power: Mapping
Trajectories in Wesleyan Theology. Edited by M. Douglas Meeks, 111-126.
Nashville: Kingswood Books, 2000. Pg 117
[18] Luther, Martin.
Luther's Spirituality. Edited and Translated by Philip D. W. Krey & Peter
D. S. Krey. New York: Paulist, 2007. Pg 90
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