We continue our look at Jurgen Moltmann's work The Crucified God. Direct citations are shown in quotes, with occasional interpretive comments.
"It is impossible to overlook how much this passion mysticism was and is the devotion of the laity in Christianity. It is demonstrably the devotion of the poor and sick, the oppressed and crushed. The 'God' of the poor, the peasant and the slave has always been the poor, suffering, unprotected Christ, whereas the God of empires and rulers has usually been the Pantocrator, Christ enthroned in heaven. In the later Middle Ages, the Christian people of Europe were seized by this devotion to the passion. The Byzantine portraits of Christ, the divine Lord of heaven, and the imperial images of Christ, the judge of the world, were supplemented in churches by images of the crucified Christ of the poor, in which no realistic detail of pain and torture was omitted. The 'man of sorrows' spoke to those who were wasting away in pain, and to whom no one else spoke, because no one could help them." (46)
"This mysticism of the passion has discovered a truth about Christ which ought not to be suppressed by being understood in a superficial way. It can be summed up by saying that suffering is overcome by suffering, and wounds are healed by wounds. For the suffering in suffering is the lack of love, and the wounds in wounds are the abandonment, and the powerlessness in pain in unbelief. And therefore the suffering of abandonment is overcome by the suffering of love, which is not afraid of what is sick and ugly, but accepts it and takes it to itself in order to heal it. Through his own abandonment by God, the crucified Christ brings God to those who are abandoned by God. Through his suffering he brings salvation to those who suffer. Through his death he brings eternal life to those who are dying. And therefore the tempted, rejected, suffering and dying Christ came to be the centre of the religion of the oppressed and the piety of the lost. And it is here, in the theology of the mysticism of the cross in the late Middle Ages, that we first hear the monstrous phrase 'the crucified God', which Luther then took up." (46)
"In our own time, this understanding has taken on new vitality in Protestant theology. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison, shortly before his execution: 'God lets himself be pushed out of the world onto the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matthew 8:17 (Note 1) makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering ... Only the suffering God can help ... That is a reversal of what the religious man expects from God. Man is summoned to share in God's sufferings at the hands of a godless world.' D. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison. (47)
"'In Europe, Christmas and Easter are the high points of the church year ... This is not so in Latin America...Their feast is Holy Week. The suffering and death of Jesus, the pain and mourning is something in which they can share. There they are at home. That is their life. The submission to fate and ability to suffer of the original inhabitants of Latin America has long been assisted by particular devotional forms. These include the stations of the cross, intercessory processions around representations of the fourteen biblical and legendary stations of Jesus during his passion.'" (Moltmann quoting H. Luning) (47)
"Similarly, the piety of the Negro spirituals sung by black slaves in the southern states of the USA concentrates upon the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. For them his sufferings and death were a symbol of their own sufferings, their despised condition and their temptations in an unfriendly and inhumane world. They saw their fate in his sufferings. On the other hand, they could say that when Jesus was nailed to the cross and the Roman soldiers stabbed him in the side, he was not alone. The black slaves suffered with him and died with him." (48)
"Of course the mysticism of suffering can easily be perverted into a justification of suffering itself. The mysticism of the cross can of course praise submission to fate as a virtue and be perverted into melancholy apathy. To suffer with the crucified Christ can also lead to self-pity. But faith is then dissociated from the suffering Christ, seeing him as no more than a replaceable pattern for one's own sufferings, as the patient sufferer who provides the example for one's own endurance of an alien destiny. His suffering is then no longer of special significance for one's own acceptance of suffering. It does not change anything in it, nor does it change the human being who suffers. The church has much abused the theology of the cross and the mysticism of the passion in the interest of those who cause the suffering. To often, peasants, Indians and black slaves have been called upon by the representatives of the dominant religion to accept their sufferings as 'their cross' and not to rebel against them. ... A sermon on the cross would have done the princes and the bourgeoisie who ruled them a great deal of good, if it was aimed as setting them free from their pride and moving them to an attitude of solidarity with their victims. Thus it makes a difference who speaks of this mysticism of the cross, to whom he speaks and in whose interests he speaks. In a world of domination and oppression one must pay close attention to the concrete function of any preaching and any devotion. As 'opium for the people', produced by those who caused the suffering, this mysticism of suffering is a blasphemy, a kind of monstrous product of inhumanity." (49)
"But this does not explain the strange fact that the Christ of the poor has always been the crucified Christ. What do they themselves see in him? They clearly do not find in his passion another 'poor devil' who had no better luck than they. Rather, they find in him the brother who put off his divine form and took on the form of a slave (Philippians 2) (Note 2), to be with them and to love them. They find in him a God who does not torture them ...but becomes their brother and companion. Where their own lives have been deprived of freedom, dignity and humanity, they find in fellowship with him respect, recognition, human dignity and hope. They find this, their true identity, hidden and guaranteed in the Christ who suffers with them, so that no one can deprive them of this identity (Colossians 3:3) They find open to them in the crucified Christ the heaven from which, as a negro spiritual says, 'No one can throw me out', as from a white bus. As a result, this mysticism of the cross on the part of the oppressed is in fact an 'expression of misery', and is already implicitly a 'protest against misery' as Marx said. In essence, however, it is something more, and something quite different, which was not recognized by Marx: that God counts them worthy and the belief that Christ loves them." (49-50)
"When the poor and oppressed look upon the poor and humiliated Christ they do not see only their own poverty and humiliation repeated in another human being. He shows them their misery in someone who is different from them...There is no mention in the gospels of his suffering from nature and fate, and his economic sufferings as a 'carpenter's son'. Rather, his sufferings and humiliation came from his actions, from his preaching of the imminence of the kingdom as a kingdom of unconditional grace, from his freedom towards the law, and from his table fellowship with 'sinners and tax-collectors'. Jesus did not suffer passively from the world in which he lived, but incited it against himself by his message and the life he lived. Nor did his crucifixion in Jerusalem come upon him as the act of an evil destiny, so that one could speak of a heroic failure, as heroes have often failed and remained heroes ... According to the gospels, Jesus himself set out for Jerusalem and actively took the expected suffering upon himself." (51)
"By proclaiming the righteousness of God as the right of those who were rejected and without grace to receive grace, he provoked the hostility of the guardians of the law. By becoming a 'friend of sinners and tax collectors', he made their enemies his enemies. By claiming that God himself was on the side of the godless, he incited the devout against him and was cast out into the godlessness of Golgotha. The more the mysticism of the cross recognizes this, the less it can accept Jesus as an example of patience and submission to fate. The more it recognizes his active suffering, the less it can make him the archetype of its own weakness." (51)
"To the extent that men in misery feel his solidarity with them, their solidarity with his sufferings brings them out of their situation. If they understand him as their brother in their sufferings, they in turn do not become imitators of his sufferings until they accept his mission and actively follow him. He suffered on account of the liberating word of God, and died on account of his liberating fellowship with those who were not free. Consequently, his sufferings and death are the messianic sufferings and death of the 'Christ of God'. His death is the death of the one who redeems men from death, which is evil... And the traditional Christian praise of poverty cannot be Christian if it simply gives a religious blessing to the situation of the poor, promising them compensation in heaven, so that on earth the poor become poorer and the rich become richer. As Jesus understood it, poverty is 'to become poor', to empty oneself and devote everything that one is and has to the liberation of the poor. 'Though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich,' said Paul (2 Corinthians 8:9).
As the people of the crucified Christ, the church originated in the particular earthly events of the oppression and liberation of Jesus, and exists in the midst of a divided and mutually hostile world of inhuman people on one side and dehumanized people on the other. Its concrete language must therefore take this difference into account, and its action must be that of commitment. The liberation of the poor from the vicious circle of poverty is different in form from the liberation of the rich from the vicious circle of riches, although both vicious circles are interlinked. The justification of godless sinners is different from that of the sinful devout... Thus to save all men, and in accordance with the contradiction of the cross, the church of the crucified Christ must take sides in the concrete social and political conflicts going on about it and in which it is involved, and must be prepared to join and form parties. It must not ally itself with the existing parties, but in a partisan fashion intervene on behalf of betrayed humanity and suppressed freedom. The sole legitimate starting point for this is the apprehension of the liberating cross of Christ in the concrete situations in which it is involved with others.
NOTES
Note 1: Matthew 8:17 (NIV) When evening came, many who were demon-possessed were brought to him, and he drove out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick. This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah: "He took up our infirmities and carried our diseases."
Note 2: Philippians 2:5-8 (NIV) In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature[a] God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature[b] of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross!
Note 3: Colossians 3:3 (NIV) For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jurgen Moltmann. The Crucified God. 1974. Harper & Rowe, Publishers. (First Fortress Press edition published in 1993.)
Image - Icon of Extreme Humility - taken from an article by Joanne Jamis Cain, Orthodox Christian Network, http://myocn.net/icon-extreme-humility/