(Ir)religiosity

“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.

“Waterboarding is torture.”

– Attorney General-designate Eric Holder