A Meditation on Embracing the Darkness

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was no rhetorical question.  Jesus did not know the answer.  If those last words of Jesus were not asked for real, if they were just some show to say to an unappreciating world, “look how much I’m suffering for you!” then Jesus was never fully incarnated, never had the full deal of the shittiest elements of the human experience, which includes not understanding why suffering and injustice exist: he was merely slumming.

Both trees—the tree Adam and Eve ate from and the tree Jesus died on—are absurd.  That is the whole point.  It makes no sense that from a creation that was good in every respect a choice was made that brought sin and death into the world.  It makes no sense that omnipotent God, the ground of all being, must suffer death for life to prevail.  If we could make sense of evil, that would mean God had ordered a proper place for it in the creation, or that evil was a force outside his control and rivalling him.  Christianity rejects both these positions.

Jesus did not die absurdly so we could make sense of our own pain.  He embraced the darkness and absurdity that we also are in.  His resurrection indicates there is an answer to his question, but we do not know what it is.

I know this is not a rational answer to the problem of evil.  My point is that this side of the grave there isn’t such an answer even imaginable.  But let me say that the cross and the Resurrection are grounds for faith in the unimaginable.