What died on the cross

Yes, God died on the cross, but I submit to you that what died on the cross was also every myth of God that humans have ever cooked up with their sick imaginations.

This is why the death of God on the cross serves as such a potent demonstration of the change which both humanity and God underwent together in the life of Jesus. In the cross of Christ, we undergo a passage from an obsessive relation to God mediated through Law to a free life where Love works beyond good and evil.

What stands in God's place now is simply the bare assertion of God's own self-definition. In the wake of the cross, we now have to grapple with who God has revealed Himself to be, laying waste to all the games we used to play around Him.

The sacrifices we offered, from the immolation of babies to the cruel lacerations we applied to our own hearts and minds, these all were revealed as empty and useless. Like the prophets of Baal who cut themselves and cry out all day long to no avail, we now see that God is not interested in such ministrations, and that they are nothing more than a narcissism which sees only in its lover what it desperately wants to see, always missing a true encounter with the excess of their subjectivity.

With the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God returns to history as an agent. By dying on the cross and then returning from the grave, God acts without reference to our need for Him to be something particular for us, instead moving towards us for His own purposes, unsettling our closed fantasy world by His own radical act of self-disclosure. As Cleo Kearns asked at last week's conference about Christian Atheism, what if God's excess is more terrifying than His lack?

We now confront the choice between retreating to the psychosis of pre-Christian religion with its integrated cosmology and spiritual paranoia, or coming into a new awareness and practice of ourselves as subjects in partnership with the Absolute as subject too. As Barth emphasizes in his talk "The Humanity of God," we find ourselves now in a relationship with God who includes us in His mission, inviting us into His plan as partners. Can we walk out of the tomb of self into this resurrection life?

As God draws near to us in this terrifying encounter, He brings a hush to our desperate striving. What stands out to me the most about the God of Abraham and of Jesus is the way that He overrides human effort, takes the initiative in His relation to others, and breaks the deadlocks which arise from all the paradigms with which we instinctively approach Him – we can never be good enough according to the Law, so He offers a final sacrifice to be done with all that. When we did not know Him, He made Himself known through words and deeds. When we couldn't approach His all-consuming holiness, He chose to dwell with us and made a way instead. He makes promises and covenants, taking oaths upon Himself, always becoming both the author and finisher of His acts of love.

Nonetheless, we still find ourselves drawn back to the existential pain of trying to use the Law to earn God's love. Why? I think we want to retain some control over that relationship, to extract God's love through satisfying His requirements.

Do we really want to be "even" with God?

Our obsessive need to neutralize the threat of the other hits up against the wall of God's pure self-assertion where we realize that the free acceptance of infinite generosity requires a radical change from us. The gift of God's love comes with a price, but this price is not paid to earn it – the cost only appears once we've accepted God's hospitality and understand that we can never be the same after experiencing the power of true love at work in our lives.

If a myth is a story which makes sense of the status quo, then the death of God on the cross is an anti-myth – it produces an irruption within our world, causing things to make even less sense than they did before. This anti-myth invites us into a journey without providing all the answers, because it offers the prospects of a genuine kinship and partnership with God. Such a relation cannot be determined from the outset, only becoming actual through our walking with it.

This myth that humans have repeated to ourselves for ages, that God is distant, needs to be appeased, and only extracts compliance from us, has to die for us to truly know Emmanuel – "God with us" – but the only way for our illusions about God to die is through a genuine encounter with Him as an Other.

In the death and life of Jesus Christ, God speaks, and we have the opportunity to listen for the very first time.