Skip to main content

God has to die


John 20.11-18
‘God has to die,’ said David Peters a former army chaplain who served in Iraq. The God we learn about in Junior Church, who always keeps us safe, who can overcome everything that life could possibly throw at us, who makes sure that love and goodness always come out on top, ‘has to shatter into a thousand pieces, die, disappear or change.’ Only then can our belief in God survive the bad things that happen. Only then can we find a grown-up sort of faith.
When he was serving with the army, Peters was inspired by 'Paul Tillich, a German American theologian who’d also served as a chaplain - but during the first world war. The carnage of that war and its heavy psychological toll pushed Tillich to the brink of his faith and beyond. Tillich hit rock bottom and... came to see God as ... a god who met him in darkness when the other version of God had proved trivial and inadequate.'
Shattering into a thousand pieces sounds like a bad thing, but actually it can be a joyful thing, a transformation, a new beginning. That’s what’s happening in the picture. The old picture of God, to whom nothing bad can ever happen, is being shattered and out of the pieces emerges a new God who not only dies but is raised to new life. He meets us in darkness, in the darkest times in our lives. And it’s like an explosion of light and colour, an explosion of joy.
That’s what Mary Magdalen found when she went to the garden to visit Jesus’  tomb. Her old vision of Jesus, as the person she could hold onto and who would protect her, had already been crushed on Good Friday. But she still wasn’t ready to let go when she met him, apparently alive again, outside the tomb.
Her old way of thinking about Jesus had to change and be left behind with his folded grave clothes. It had to be shattered into a thousand pieces and put back together again in a new way. But that was wonderful. It was exciting. It was good news. It changed Easter from a sad time into a glad time, a celebration that still goes on.
The Old Testament writers understood the same thing about our idea of God. The Old Testament scholar Oldi Moravi [1] says, they ‘never saw the experience of suffering as an excuse to remove God from the picture, even if it meant making God accountable for his promises.’
On the Cross, God really did die. The disciples’ old way of thinking about him, and about Jesus, was shattered into a thousand pieces and they had to start again, believing in God in a completely different way. And on the Cross God made himself accountable for the ups and downs of our lives by sharing what it means to be in despair, to face injustice and to be tormented by terrible pain. Now we can have a faith that’s fit for purpose, an Easter faith.

[1] Guidelines, The Bible Reading Fellowship, January 2017

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I don't believe in an interventionist God

Matthew 28.1-10, 1 Corinthians 15.1-11 I like Nick Cave’s song because of its audacious first line: ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’. What an unlikely way to begin a love song! He once explained that he wrote the song while sitting at the back of an Anglican church where he had gone with his wife Susie, who presumably does believe in an interventionist God - at least that’s what the song says. Actually Cave has always been very interested in religion. Sometimes he calls himself a Christian, sometimes he doesn’t, depending on how the mood takes him. He once said, ‘I believe in God in spite of religion, not because of it.’ But his lyrics often include religious themes and he has also said that any true love song is a song for God. So maybe it’s no coincidence that he began this song in such an unlikely way, although he says the inspiration came to him during the sermon. The vicar was droning on about something when the first line of the song just popped into his

Giotto’s Nativity and Adoration of the Shepherds

John 1.10-18 In the week before Christmas the BBC broadcast a modern version of The Nativity which attempted to retell the story with as much psychological realism as possible. So, for instance, viewers saw how Mary, and Joseph especially, struggled with their feelings. But telling the story of Jesus with psychological realism is not a new idea. It has a long tradition going back seven hundred years to the time of the Italian artist Giotto di Bondone. This nativity scene was painted in a church in Padua in about 1305. Much imitated it is one of the first attempts at psychological realism in Christian art. And what a wonderful first attempt it is - a work of genius, in fact! Whereas previously Mary and the Baby Jesus had been depicted facing outwards, or looking at their visitors, with beatific expressions fixed on their faces, Giotto dares to show them staring intently into one another’s eyes, bonding like any mother and newborn baby. Joseph, in contrast, is not looking on with quiet a

Meeting Jesus on Zoom

‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.’ (John 20.19-31 ( https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA) This is my second reflection about today’s Gospel reading but I wanted to write something about meeting Jesus on Zoom. Zoom’s been very useful during the lockdown, but it’s also got a bad press. Various mischief makers have gatecrashed meetings on Zoom, either to eavesdrop or make inappropriate comments. That’s why worshippers needed permission to join our on-line service this week. If they managed to press all the right buttons, and entered all the right codes, they should've found themselves looking at a screen not unlike the cartoon picture below of the eleven apostles trying to meet on Zoom with the risen Jesus. Anyone who couldn't see the service on the screen would've been in good company. In the cartoon Jesus has done something wrong. Either he hasn’t enabled Zoom to t