Good Friday at ground zero
Introduction
“Passio Domini nostri Iesu Christi…”
“The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ…”
Bad news:
A great
free-thinker once said, “ In the beginning God created man according his image
and likeness, and ever since then man has been getting even by creating God
according to man’s image and likeness.” And that has proved to be disastrous,
because we all know how revengeful and inhuman we humans can look. So down
through the ages, God, created according to our image, has been working
vengeance upon wicked villages and towns by visiting them with floods, famines
and earthquakes. Down through the centuries, God has been punishing unrighteous
sons and daughters by visiting upon them all sorts of disasters and diseases. In recent decades, God has been laying low
immoral sinners with the new leprosy of AIDS. And in the unspeakable disaster
of 9/11, the anger of the Christian God has been at work, “pointing a finger at
the ACLU, the People for the American Way, the abortionists, the gays and
lesbians.” At work at the ground zero
was also the anger of Allah against the unrighteous Infidels of the West. A
God, “Almighty and All-powerful,” who
does not suffer but makes everyone else suffer is insufferable. Such a God
created according to our likeness is Bad News.
Good news:
On Good Friday
there is announced the Good News about the
"Passio Domini nostri Iesu Christi," about the “Passion (the pain, the suffering, the
agony) of our Lord Jesus Christ," the Good News about the God who makes
no one suffer but who suffers because the children suffer! The Gospel sees God as a father
who broods over the sufferings of the children, and who is in ceaseless effort
to pour the oil of compassion into their wounds and heal them. The God of the Gospel not only does not
send suffering upon us but also wants help from us to relieve our
sufferings. In The Divine Milieu, Teilhard de Chardin
writes, “To struggle against evil and to reduce to a minimum even the ordinary physical evil which threatens us
is unquestionably the first act of our Father who is in heaven; it would
be impossible to conceive God in any
other way, and still more impossible to love God.”[1]
The God who did not cause us suffer at ground zero but who, in fact,
suffers because we suffer at ground zero -- that God is not only sufferable but
is, indeed, marvelously Good News.
Conclusion
Better Good News!
But the
marvelously Good News gets even better still!
God not only suffers because of our sufferings, but also
because of God’s very own sufferings! After the Incarnation, the
”Almighty and All-powerful God” is no longer wrapped up snuggly and safely in “divine insufferability.” Paul
writes in Philippians,
“Have this mind in you
which was in Christ Jesus:
though he was he was very God,
he let go of all that and humbled himself
and became one of us.
And he humbled himself still further,
by becoming obedient to death—
even to death on a cross!” (Phil 2: 5-8).
After the
Incarnation, the ”Almighty and
All-powerful God” is no longer wrapped
up snuggly and safely in “divine insufferability.” And we now, after the
Incarnation, in our “human sufferability” can no longer “fire back” at God.
Marianne Pearl,
husband of Wall Street Journalist, Danny Pearl, can no longer “fire back” at
God asking, “Where were you and what
were you doing when my husband Danny was being tortured by Islamic terrorists?”
Lisa Beamer, wife of Todd Morgan Beamer who was on that fatal flight 93 bound
for San Francisco on September 11th, can no longer “fire back” at
God asking, “Where were you and what
were you doing when Todd said good bye to me, and then `rolled’ to his death
with others?” After the Incarnation
when the “Almighty and All-powerful” God lost “divine insufferability,” all the
many thousands of living victims of 9/11 can no longer “fire back” at God
asking, “Where were you and what were you doing on that horrific day when we
lost a loved one?”
After the
Incarnation, God can now “fire back” saying, “I was doing just what you were
doing: weeping over `a beloved one – a son in whom I was well-pleased’ but who,
also like your loved one, is now crucified, dead and buried.”