By Thomas M. Fidelis, OCSO

(Father Thomas Fidelis is a member of the community at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers.)

On Good Friday of the year 1578, in the cramped cell of his prison at Toledo, the diminutive but indomitable friar John of the Cross took up his broken quill, dipped it in black ink and sketched a scene of the crucified Jesus from a perspective never before attempted: the Father looking down upon His Son. John attached no Scripture text to the image, but one can readily supply the very words the Father spoke, as out of thunder at His Son's Baptism and Transfiguration, "This is my beloved Son in Whom I take delight." Unfortunately, the sketch had little subsequent impact on the history of sacred art until our own day, when Salvador Dali took vital inspiration from it and created his own modernistic version.

But let us turn for a moment to another prison cell, and its distinguished occupant, Dietrick Bonhoeffer, the heroic Lutheran pastor, imprisoned by the Nazis for his vigorous opposition to their anti-Christian programs. Concentration camp solitude gave him time to reflect on the cross of Jesus and its significance for contemporary man. In that cell he too drew a picture of the Crucified, not in linear drawing, but in words that are only now shedding their profound meaning:

People go to God when they are sore bestead, Pray to him for succour, for his peace, for bread, For mercy for their sick, sinning or dead: All people do so, Christian and unbelieving. People go to God when He is sore bestead, Find Him poor and scorned, without shelter or bread, Whelmed under weight of the wicked, the weak, the dead: Christians stand by God in His hour of grieving.

What is startling about Bonhoeffer's vision is that where we would have expected him to say "Jesus in the second stanza, he deliberately inserted the word "God". Most interpreters of the poem ignored the substitution, claiming that it was a theological slip on the part of poor Bonhoeffer, so beaten and starved, that he could not think straight under his cruel prison regime. However, in 1972, the prestigious German Protestant theologian Jurgen Moltmann shocked the academic world by his support of Bonhoeffer's view, writing a vigorous defense of it in his book, The Crucified God.

Moltmann argued that both Western and Eastern Christianity have illegitimately borrowed too much of their theology of God from Plato and Plotinus, and have not taken seriously the startling language of the Old Testament about the God who changes. The Greeks taught that God was immutable, unchanging, totally unaffected by His creation. When confronted with the God of the Hebrews, they merely shrugged their shoulders, charging that the changing Hebrew God was either an inferior deity, or that the language was purely anthropomorphic. Even previous to Bonhoeffer and Moltmann, Professor Whitehead was warning the West in his Process Theology that Greek notions of an unchanging God could not be square with the biblical revelation. He taught that once the transcendent God had decided to create and save His people, then He must, of necessity, enter into a living, changing, relationship with them. In a word, God is now heavily involved, and that means constant change on His part, as He initiates or responds to His creatures.

Only the New Testament, of all the ancient religious, claimed that "God is love," and not merely power or knowledge. But the willingness and ability to suffer with others is a basic component of love, or else it forfeits credibility. Can God truly describe himself as love if historical love does not affect him? Moltmann answers: "If God were incapable of suffering … then God would also be incapable of loving." Since love is the acceptance of another, without taking thought of one's own well being, then it contains within itself the capacity for compassion, and the freedom to suffer the otherness of the other. An inability to suffer would contradict the basic Christian assertion that "God is love."

But lest we bog down in theoretical discussions on whether God can or does change, or whether one can interchange Jesus and God, let us go to the New Testament, and hear Jesus Himself, less than twenty-four hours before his crucifixion, treat this very issue. At the Last Supper, as he was speaking of the Father, Philip interrupted, "Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us." "Philip," Jesus replied, "after I have been with you all this time, you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me, has seen the Father … Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?" (Jn. 14: 8-10) Now, dear reader, look again at the pen drawing of the crucified. In the light of Jesus' own affirmation "I am in the Father and the Father is in me" cannot you see GOD crucified!

Someone might object that the agonized words of Jesus on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" do not bear out this thinking. It is true that at this scene there is no voice thundering from heaven, "You are my beloved Son in whom I take delight." And why? I suggest that Calvary is the complete reversal of the ending of the Book of Job. There, God roars out of the whirlwind, browbeating Job for daring to question Him on the subject of the innocent person suffering. Does not Job realize he is dealing with the unchanging, transcendent God? But on Calvary, the desperate plea of the innocent sufferer is met with complete silence, because … because … "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself" (2 Cor. 5:19) -- right there on the cross.