God With Us: In Life and Death
God Joins Us in the Graves We Stand In
A brief meditation on Holy Week and beyond.
In Katherine Sonderegger’s first volume of systematic theology, she offers a novel way of understanding God’s omnipotence: as divine humility, God’s own presence. God’s power, she contends, is not depicted as infinite possibility, but as infinitely deep presence to the creation.
If God, revealed among us, is truly God, then there is no shadow puppetry going on: God is truly the invisible, infinite, and infitinitely present and holy one.
As she puts it with respect to Holy Week:
We stand apart from those we judge, the exalted, the aloof, the superior power; but not He, not the humble Lord of the covenant. He is the Judge as the One with us. As the One who has entered into solidarity with sin and with sinners, He alone judges what He knows, yet is without sin, the Holy One. Such is the Deity, the Omnipotence of Christ: He is the Life, the Vitality, within the death of sin1.
Or as
put succinctly:The relation of Christ—as the Holy one of Israel—to this thief has been a matter of contemplation for a long time. Is Christ’s commendation to him a one-off, an offer of salvation made only here? Is this something of an exception to a rule of repentance and salvation? If the Gospels are displaying truly God, truly man, ever and always, then what we have on offer is God accepting the thief, unbaptized2, who offers no confession of Christ’s deity that we can intelligibly name.
The thief offers a hope of some future that is present beyond the death he is about to endure, and in doing so, entrusts himself to the God who is about to die alongside him. We should not make too much of this, but nor should we make too little of it. For what is confessed only matters insofar as what is confessed is true, and it seems here that in this action, what is confessed and presumed about Jesus is in fact true about God.
What appears first and last is the presence of God to the suffering, the joining of the Holy One to the thief in a way which does not end with death. The thief does not enjoy resurrection, but enjoys first and foremost the presence of God, the remembrance of God, the solidarity of God. For death is not something internal to God: death is the last enemy.
But God’s joining with the thief entails God taking on that which is alien to Him while true about us. Jesus’ joining with the thief entails God joining with the one who, aiming at a hope he cannot name, is taken up into paradise as a promise and a fact. Jesus’ joining with the thief in life, suffering, and death, toward the thief’s hope and eventual exaltation (in other words) is what God always and ever is.
It is no exaggeration to say that we humans, and more precisely for most of my readers, live in a United States which is drowning in more of it than we ask for. For we ask regularly for a little death—for our enemies, for our opponents, for ourselves in times of extreme suffering. But we have been given more of it than we wanted: in expanding euthanasia, in the abolition of food programs, in the swamping of our brains in endless media, in the cratering of educational systems under both bureaucracies and autocratic fiat, in policies which seek to abolish families and instill fear.
We wanted just enough death to be able to wield as a threat, and found that death is an expanding flower, which begins in desire, becomes visible as law, and then overtakes even the culture which tries to say no3. It is, as the poet laureate of death William Stringfellow put it after a weekend in the Upper West Side:
There was little life and joy in this place. Death was indeed, as far as I could discern, very much at work there despite the securit of the people from the ordinary threats of disease, poverty, or overcrowding. Death works just as well through affluence, social conformity, boredom, lust, and ambition. The signs of death’s reality and ubiquity are read, in other words, in every place, in all that happens….It is the imminent truth about every and any event in this world. Death is a living power in this world, greater, apart from God himself, than any other reality in existence4.
But it is in this world that God joins us, this dying world. And in and through it, God stages a great resistance to death—the resurrection of the dead—which offers up the whole world as a living sacrifice to the Father. God joins with us in death, tarries with us, and puts to death that death which kills us.
God, as we know from the beginning, remains faithful to a sinful people, a people in exile, a people in apostasy, to thieves on the cross.
The hope is that, in being faithful to the thief, in beginning with this poor man—dead of the state, discarded in a forgotten hill, shamed in his agony—a place in paradise, God might even be faithful to me.
Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 217.
Baptism by desire is one way to get around this conundrum: that given the opportunity, the thief would have in fact joined the company of those with Jesus and submitted to John’s baptism of repentance. It’s likely. But the materiality of the matter, matters.
For a phenomenal book on this theme, see Matthew Croasmun’s The Emergence of Sin.
William Stringfellow, Free in Obedience, 68-69.