(Ir)religiosity

If God in Christ dies for real on the cross then what is the meaning of the resurrection?

My contention would be that Good Friday is not superseded by Easter Sunday, that the resurrection does not supplant the crucifixion.

The problem, I think, is that we are too quick to separate Pentecost from the Resurrection.  Pentecost marks the entrance of the Holy Spirit into the faith collective, the arrival of a new signifier which, after Christ’s death on the cross, is immanent to the collective itself.

The collective, then, is one that is deprived of its support from the Big other, as Zizek would put it.  Christ is raised in the community of believers through the liberative power of the Holy Spirit.  The entrance of the Spirit as the life of the collective spells the end of God as transcendental signified and the beginning of God as emancipatory event.

The resurrection of Christ does not involve a mere return or reduplication of his prior presence.  Rather, it involves the repetition of that presence with critical difference (i.e., the Spirit).  The logic of resurrection is in fact the logic of repetition.  The absence of God qua Big other, of God qua transcendental signified is overcome (that is, repeated, resurrected) with the presence of the Spirit, with the entrance of a new liberative signifier immanent and intrinsic to the community.

Under this sign, with the power of the Spirit, and the galvanizing memory of God’s crucified body, the community of believers perpetually enacts a non-identical repetition of Christ’s gesture under the conviction that Empire can never repress such a memory absolutely.  Indeed, there will always remain a liberative surplus, an emancipatory kernel, which opens up the space for crucial theo-political praxis and social antagonism.  It is here, in this tear in the ontological fabric of Empire, where God’s event pierces and violates its supposed immanence, that Christ is indeed resurrected.  And it is incumbent on the community, on its participation and repetition.

Shortly before he was martyred, Archbishop Oscar Romero wrote, “If I am killed I shall rise again in the Salvadoran people.”  Similarly, in an important scene of V for Vendetta, V states that “ideas are bulletproof.”  When Easter is celebrated in anticipation of Pentecost one can properly claim that the most important and liberative idea of all is in fact crucifixion-proof.  While God as transcendental signified may have died on the cross, the idea of God’s kin-dom surely did not.  The instruments of torture and state-sponsored terrorism cannot hold it because Empire can never maintain absolute hegemonic control.  Even as God is dead, even as God is eclipsed, Christ is risen, made present in the community through the power of the Spirit.  And it is through this dangerous, galvanizing memory that the church enacts critical repetition, in (e)sc(h)atological anticipation of the consummation of the (in/re)surrection.

“Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?”

There are basically two reactions to the notion of Good Friday.  On the one hand, some claim that the goodness lies in God’s redemptive work in Christ, of “saving” through the world the violent, bloody sacrifice.  Suffering is intrinsically redemptive.  This is, of course, the main thrust of most atonement theories.  A less popular reaction, on the other hand, is to question whether the label itself and to note irony of naming this day “Good” Friday.  How can there be goodness in an execution, in a state-sponsored act of terrorism?

I find both of these positions lacking.

Today, as I am increasingly inclined to do, I want to riff on the minor chord, on what has been repressed in our dominant understandings of the cross.

What if the goodness of Good Friday lies not in the presuppositions of classical theology but in the other side of the binary that has not been privileged in dominant discourse?  What if the goodness about this day is not that Christ dies in anticipation of Sunday, but that Christ dies for real, that God, as evidenced in Christ’s death cry on the cross, is forever eclipsed?

And what if in that event the power of God is revealed as God’s powerlessness, as God’s weakness?

Good Friday, or so I would want to argue, needs a recovered sense of kenosis. Or, better yet, we need to take kenosis more seriously.  The logic of the cross — and the incarnation — is that of immanent transcendence.  In this event, God’s transcendence is rendered immanent, transcendence is reifed not as that which is somewhere “out there” but that which transcends a particular form of immanence (e.g. state violence or, more generally, the state itself).

What is at stake is how radical we are willing to be, indeed, how Christian we are willing to be in our theology of the cross.

John Caputo puts it quite well (it is a long quote but worth the read):

Is Jesus really unable to come down from the cross, or does he only seem to be (dokein)?  Remember, the world is what is there, in all its violence and strength.  Are we to think that being this helpless mortal frame, he holding his infinite power in check.  Are we to think that he can come down but that he just does not want to because he is trying to make a point?  Is he really nailed there, or is that just an appearance or semblance (dokesis)?  Is his weakness voluntary, in which case it is a mask for strength, an even greater show of strength?  In the world, there are real (Roman) nails and real (Roman) crosses and real imperial power.  The Romans are real.  If the kingdom Jesus preached were a kingdom of real power, he could, by a might roar — nay better, by a soft word — from this mouth, spring that nails from his hands, thrust away the spears from the hands of the soldiers, heal the wounds of his flesh, and shatter the cross into a million splinters in a dazzling display of sheer might.  But his kingdom did not belong to the world, to the realm of meeting power with power.  His strength was the weak power of powerlessness — my God, my God, why have you abandoned me? — not the real power of the world, and so he was killed, quite against his will and against the will of his Father.  But in the powerlessness of that death the word of God rose up in majesty as a word of contradiction, as the Spirit of God, as a specter, as a ghostly even that haunts us, but not as a spectacular presence.

That is God’s transcendence.

On the classical account of strong theology, Jesus was holding back his divine power in order to let his human nature suffer.  He freely chose to check his power because the Father had a plan to redeem the world with his blood.  But if his Father had changed his mind, those Roman soldiers would rue the day they were born, as they will certainly rue it in eternity.  On my accounting, that is to misconstrue this scene solely in terms of power, mundane power pitted against celestial power.  On my accounting, Jesus was being crucified, not holding back; he was nailed there and being executed very much against his will and the will of God.  And he never heard of Christianity’s novel idea that he was redeeming the world with his blood.  His approach to evil was forgiveness, not paying off a debt due the Father, or the devil, with suffering or anything else.  His suffering was not a coin of the realm in economy of the kingdom.  The kingdom is not an economy, and God is not in attendance at this scene as an accountant of divine debts or as a higher power watching the whole thing from up there and freely holding in check his infinite power to intervene.  This is more rouged theology, weakness fantasizing about an orgasm of power — if not power now, then power later, when we can really get even with those hateful Romans.  This is not the weakness of God that I am here defending.  God, the event harbored by the name of God, is present at the crucifixion, as the power of powerlessness of Jesus, in and as the protest against the injustice that rises up from the cross, in and as the words of forgiveness, not a deferred power that will be visited upon one’s enemies at a later time.  God is in attendance as the weak force of the call that cries out from Calvary and calls across the epochs, that cries out from every corpse created by every cruel and unjust power.  The logos of the cross is a call to renounce violence, not to conceal and defer it and then, in a stunning act that takes the enemy by surprise, to lay them low with real power, which shows the enemy who really has power.

The effect of situating God on the side of vulnerability and unjust suffering is not, of course, to glorify suffering and misery, but to prophetically protest it, to give divine depth and meaning to resistance to unjust suffering, to attach the coefficient of divine resistance to unjust suffering, which is why suffering is the stuff of dangerous memories.  The call, the cry, that plaint that rises up from the cross is a a great divine “no” to injustice, an infinite lamentation over unjust suffering and innocent victims.  God is with Jesus on the cross, and in standing with Jesus rather than with the imperial power of Roman, God stands with an innocent persecuted for calling the power that be to task.  The name o God is the name of a divine “no” to persecution, violence, and victimization.  Accordingly, as we have just argued, God’s traditional top-down “transcendence” must be re-conceived in such a way that all of its resources are deployed on behalf of lowliness and the despised.  The effect of speaking of God’s transcendence is not to support and top off presence with a hyper-presence, but to disturb presence with difference and to allow the lowliest to rise in divine splendor.

The Weakness of God, 43-45.

Interestingly, this logos of the cross brings together Caputo and Zizek, two thinkers that are otherwise theoretically in-congruent.  Zizek maintains that God dies in Christ for real, that in Jesus’ claim of disbelief on the cross God as “Big other” is unmasked.

Similarly, Caputo holds that on the cross, God is revealed as event, as the site of resistance against illegitimate power — that power is reifed in terms of weakness.  The binary itself is short-circuited.

For me, the goodness of Good Friday lies in the dangerous, galvanizing memory of Christ’s crucified body on an instrument of state torture and repression and the revelation that God as transcendental signified, the arbiter of cosmic meaning from above, does not exist.  Rather, God is revealed as event, as an event of subversion and social antagonism, an irruption in the privileging of pure presence.  As God dies in Christ I am reminded that God is forever eclipsed and I am left with the faith collective to wrestle with the aftermath, with the reality that God is revealed in the repressed, the forsaken, that site of marginality is the very site of divinity.

The mystery of God for himself culminates in the words of Jesus on the cross: ‘Father, why did you forsake me?’  At that moment, God is completely abandoned by God and thus shares the human experience of being abandoned by God.  In this way, it is the moment when ‘Christ becomes fully human,’ the moment when ‘the radical gap that separates God from man is transposed into God Himself.’  On the cross, God abandons himself totally and in this way the absolute identity of God and humankind is realized.  Or, as Žižek puts it: ‘When I, a human being, experience myself as cut off from God, at that very moment of the utmost abjection, I am absolutely close to God, since I find myself in the position of the abandoned Christ.’

– Frederiek Depoortere in Christ in Postmodern Philosophy (115)

Today God is eclipsed….and we are left to wrestle with its aftermath.