Good Friday, April 19, 2019 | 8:00 a.m.

Is God Dead?

Lucy Forster-Smith
Senior Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

On April 8, 1966, the cover of Time magazine led with just three words: “Is God Dead?” The day it hit the newsstands was Good Friday that year. And the stir, the outrage, the gut-punching question came at a time when the usually backroom debate of a few radical theologians “suddenly captured the imagination—and fears—of the nation” (“‘Is God Dead?’ at 50,” time.com/isgoddead). But Time magazine’s explosive question is the question we face today and every Good Friday. Is God dead? When Jesus died on that cross, did God, the creator of it all, suffer and die? And has God been absent, in one way or another, ever since?

It is a startling question, yes. And it is a question that harbors the most life-pressing assumptions one can make. What would our world be like if God is dead? How would the world be different if Jesus’ death on the cross that dark day thousands of years ago had put the light out, had left the world without a shred of God? Does it make any difference in our lives if God died on that cross in Jesus Christ—that the bloodied, beat-up body was taken down and carried away by a wealthy man, wrapped in a linen cloth, and laid in a newly carved tomb in the man’s garden?

Of course it is very hard for twenty-first-century Christians to honestly answer this question, because we cannot help but see the crucifixion through the gospel truth of Easter. We take up very hefty theological readings of what happened on that cross: Jesus giving himself over to death as the sacrificial lamb who bears the sins of the world. Or as we encounter the horror of it, we believe it was all in God’s plan for Jesus to go up to Jerusalem, suffer, and die in order to be raised up in glory. Or we hear the story from the political viewpoint that Jesus was so offensive to the Roman Empire, with his message of God’s kingdom being planted here on earth, that he was such a threat, that he had to be done away with. Or as Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan suggest, “Jesus died, not so much for the sins of the world as because of the sins of the world” (Crossan and Borg, The Last Week: What the Gospels Teach about Jesus’ Last Week, pp. 138–163). The cross is a symbol of sin, and also, as they say, “it is supremely a symbol of God’s love.” Ultimately, God had to die our death.

What we encounter in the cross is the absence of God, just as the question on that Time magazine cover haunts our world with the questions of absence. “The cross that is a symbol of defeat before it is a symbol of victory speaks of the absence of God,” says Frederick Buechner. The cry of Jesus at the end—“My God, my God, why have you left me holding the bag, holding the world, when I can hardly any longer hold up my own head?”—is a way to put it. Indeed, says Buechner, “Jesus shares with us the darkness of what it is to be without God as well as showing forth the glory of what it is to be with God” (Frederick Buechner, Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, p. 42).

And we, who come into this space this day, who hear the story of his death, leave this space to face the cold, harsh world, a world where terrible things happen to innocent people; a world where cruel acts are rampant; a world where fires roar through mountain towns, cathedral roofs, and little timber churches in the South; a world where a young man is dragged by a pickup truck because he is gay; a world where innocent little babies are shot in the gang crossfire at a baby shower; a world where women in South Sudan simply need to feed their families and cross dangerous terrain to get food, only to be raped on the way; where lynchings are still a reality in this nation and the world simply because of someone’s skin color; a world where young people don’t see the point of living, distrust the future, don’t see the point of a world—like we don’t—without God.

There is enough pain, suffering, harm, hurt, and fear in our world to dismiss the notion that God will make it all OK, that God’s got this one. There is the history of forcing faith on individuals or cultures that came unstuck by Dachau’s mass sadism or Hiroshima’s instant death or the Twin Towers’ violation. Jesus Christ died for new life to rise up. Must the gods we have put into place in our lives die in order for a new—truly new—day to emerge in our time as well? The rise of those who are spiritual but not religious is a striking development since that cover piece in 1966. Indeed, we know Good Friday in our world.

The haunting Good Friday question fifty-two years ago on the cover of Time, “Is God dead?”, gives way to another question raised more than 2,000 years ago: “Is this Jesus dead?” This is the question that arises from the guards at the cross, who thought they needed to wait to make sure. It also came the next day, Saturday, when a group of old men showed up at Pilate’s door after the victim is dead and buried, wanting to secure the tomb. “Is he really dead?” was the question. These men were scared that their God’s future was in jeopardy, their temple, their religion, their nation. So just to be sure that the dead guy’s friends didn’t steal the body and announce a resurrection, they needed to put a seal on that tomb.

“You have a guard. Go and make it as secure as you can,” says Pilate. We have to wonder if maybe they were truly afraid that he would rise again from the grave and nothing would ever be the same again. For all their fears, there may be some things—like the sun rising or a miracle of life-shattering proportion—that simply cannot be sealed up. They seep out!

We know the sad, sorry state of our world, and though it calls on faith in ways that we may not know we have in us, we must trust that the God who was on that cross in Jesus Christ, who gave this one to us, who walked on this earth, who loved us beyond our wildest imaginings, does not leave us abandoned.

Maybe the question “Is God dead? is one that drives us to faith in its leaping, uncertain, holy help-me place. Instead of stopping at the fact that Jesus died on that cross and he dies each time the world pins its sorrow on innocent and criminal action, facing the void, facing the deep emptiness of our lives, holds within it the trust in an enormous gift that comes on its heels.

The supreme crisis of the cross—the very death of God in Christ—embodies the ultimate path forward, toward grace, so amazing, so divine, that demands my soul, my heart, my all. Amen.