Where is God?:
How the Cross Speaks to Our World and Lives Today
Isaiah 60:1-6; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12
Blair Pogue
In today’s Gospel from Matthew Magi journey from the East to Bethlehem, driven by hope and the desire to see God’s glory. Their hope is symbolized by a luminous star. The Magi are religious seekers. They seek God’s glory in the child born king of the Jews. When they finally arrive at the place to which the star points, they see a poor, teenage woman and her newborn baby. They kneel down and pay the baby homage, in a gesture of worship, offering him gifts fit for a king. Is this the glory they dreamed of? The glory they imagined during their long and uncomfortable journey to Bethlehem? How can God’s glory be revealed in the life of a poor child?
Today we celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany, the season in which we reflect on God’s manifestation to all nations. Throughout Epiphany we will use the Kenyan Eucharistic liturgy we used last year, which boldly and joyfully proclaims the Gospel. The events of the past week in Kenya and our prayer at the beginning of the liturgy that God be glorified in Kenya bring a poignancy to today’s celebration. Although conditions appear to be improving, this past week was one of serious political upheaval and loss of life in Kenya. Where, I wonder, is God in Kenya, as well as in Pakistan, Iraq and Sudan?– just to mention a few places in our world experiencing severe suffering and violence. Where is God when a church containing women and children is burned in Kenya? Where is God when rioters go wild in Pakistan, leaving a trail of looted buildings and fires in their wake?
In his powerful book The Crucified God, German theologian Jürgen Moltmann takes up these very questions. Moltmann, building on Martin Luther’s theology, argues that if we want to see and know God we must look first and primarily to the cross of Christ. Through the cross we see that God participates in human suffering, in feeling abandoned, even in grieving the loss of a child. Through the cross God inhabits the most God-forsaken of places and human circumstances. He dies the death of a criminal, misunderstood and despised. While most of us have exalted ideas of God’s glory, Moltmann urges us to look for God’s glory where we least expect to find it -- in the suffering and abandoned people and places of our world. This is the paradox of the cross, the central paradox of the Christian faith: God identifies and suffers with those who suffer. God is found where humans fear to tread.
“When God becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth,” Moltmann writes, “he not only enters into the finitude of man, but in his death on the cross also enters into the situation of man’s godforsakenness. In Jesus he does not die the natural death of a finite being, but the violent death of the criminal on the cross, the death of complete abandonment by God. The suffering in the passion of Jesus is abandonment, rejection by God, his Father. God does not become a religion so that man participates in him by corresponding religious thoughts and feelings. God does not become a law, so that man participates in him though obedience to a law. God does not become an ideal, so that man achieves community with him through constant striving. He humbles himself and takes upon himself the eternal death of the godless and godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can experience communion with him (276).”
Where then was God when the church burned in Kenya? Where was God when Pakistan imploded? “Where is God?” a parishioner dying of cancer asked me. God was in the burning church, God is with those fearing for their life, God is with the man dying of cancer. And only because God is there and God knows what it means to suffer and die, and because God took death into himself and transformed it, can God point beyond death to eternal life, both now and in the life to come. Through the cross God transforms death, fear and suffering, pointing toward the reality of resurrection.
At the end of the Kenyan liturgy we send all our problems, all our difficulties, all that is not of God to the cross of Christ. Simultaneously we set all our hopes on the risen Christ. While most of us prefer to focus on Jesus’ resurrection and God’s promise of resurrection for all who believe, resurrection is inseparable from the cross. We could have no resurrection without the cross and the cross means that no one is beyond God’s reach. As Moltmann notes, “by the secular cross on Golgotha, understood as open vulnerability and as the love of God for loveless and unloved, dehumanized men, God’s being and God’s life is open to true man. There is no ‘outside the gate’ with God, if God himself is the one who died outside the gate on Golgotha for those who are outside” (249).
Christianity is now a global faith—the world’s largest. It is growing the fastest and thriving most in Kenya, Uganda, and across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Those wise men from the East were the first of countless seekers from afar who have come to worship the Christ child and discover in his life new life for themselves. I wonder about the questions the magi left with and pondered during their long journey home. For certainly this revelation or ‘epiphany’ was not what the world expected in a king. Many of us, drawing close to the manger, have our questions too—both about Jesus, and about the world he died to save, in all its ambiguity.
It is a temptation to set on one side our idea of God as aloof, immovable, detached in his perfection, and this broken and corrupt world, on another. We then question—and rightly so—what the two have to do with one another. But the Incarnation and cross say that God is not aloof and isolated. Rather, they are the intersection points between a passionate, creative, loving Father/Mother God and this fragile world starving for redemption. The cross is the joining of death and life, of the worst and best of humanity. It is a mystery, a paradox like that of the child in the manger, that we kneel before in wonder and awe, like the magi, offering the best we have. Amen.
