Caught Up in God

I have just ordered a copy of Gerald Vann’s The Pain of Christ and the Sorrow of God, a small spiritual classic published in 1947; but Amazon.com can’t promise delivery for another month or month and a half. I am eager to get hold of this little book because of a sentence that has stayed with me from the first time I read it nearly thirty years ago. Whether or not I am remembering it correctly, these are the words I recall:

The cross is at the heart of God.

Does God Have a Heart?
For better or for worse, early Christian theology was strongly influenced by Greek philosophy. One (for me) infamous notion inherited from the philosophers is the impassibility of God. The belief that God is not capable of suffering was axiomatic for many Christian thinkers in the early centuries of the Church. It was later embraced by Thomas Aquinas, and it can still be found in the work of some contemporary theologians – this in spite of the biblical witness of a passionate God, a God who is afflicted in all our affliction (Isaiah 63:9, see RSV) and who grieves when we are unfaithful (Hosea 11:7-9).

If you believe that God cannot suffer, then it follows, as Thomas Aquinas says, that “Christ’s Passion did not pertain to his divinity” (Summa Theologica, III, Q 46, A 12). In this view, Jesus did suffer on the cross, but only in his humanity. If we carry this schema a step further, we are faced with a disturbing scenario: God the Father in no distress as he witnessed the Son in agony.

Suffering was viewed as a sign of imperfection.

However, we would probably argue — we who are made in the image of God — that the inability to suffer would itself constitute a grave flaw. It would certainly be a flaw in a human being. We know from our own experience that human maturity requires not only the ability to feel our own pain, but also the capacity for compassion, a word that literally means “suffering with.”

And from where does the ability to be compassionate come? Human beings receive this gift, like all good gifts, from God, whose own “compassion is over all that he has made” (Psalm 145:9).

If Jesus who died and was raised reveals God to us, who is the God whom he makes known?

Jesus reveals a God who is compassionate toward us like the best of fathers (Psalm 103:13), who loves us even more than a mother loves her child (Isaiah 49:15). Karl Rahner, speaking of the Incarnation, says that God’s Word who is Christ says to us: I am there. I am with you… I weep your tears. I am your joy… I am in your fear, because I have suffered it myself. I am in your death… I am your life.  (Kleines Kirchenjahr, Muenchen: Ars sacra, 1954)

We dwell in God. We are infused throughout our being with God who permeates every atom and electron and quark of our being.

The divine compassion assures us that whatever we do and experience, whether joyful or sorrowful, all is held and valued in the heart of God.

The divine omnipotence assures us that just as the pain and sorrow of Jesus were not wasted, neither will our own pain and sorrow be wasted.

The cross of Christ is at the heart of God. Our human life is in the heart of God.