God is dead

 

Holy Saturday.

To be dead is not to no longer exist. It is not even to no longer be conscious. To be dead is to dwell in the realm of the dead, a separate but connected dimension to the one we are familiar with. The Jews called this realm Sheol, the Greeks and Romans called it Hades. Every culture has its own name. Those who sincerely believe that death is the end of existence are a vanishingly small minority, even in the post-secular West.

God is dead.

How can God be dead!? God is dead because God wills it so. Because God is willing to experience being dead.

How can God return from the dead? Again, because God wills it so, and death cannot hold God against the divine free will.

Why is God dead? On one level, God is dead because human inhumanity put God to death. That is, we banished God, not into nonexistence but into exile into the realm of the dead, where we are not (yet) and so do not have to deal with God (for now).

But we were only able to kill God because God was willing to die. So, again, why is God dead?

Everything that exists, seen and unseen, exists because God created it. Willed it into being and saw that it was good. God is beyond creation, not so much that God is outside of the universe as that the universe exists within God, within the love of God. This is what is meant by the transcendence of God.

But that which exists within the love of God has freedom and has not always used that freedom to love as it is loved. And so God entered into creation, in Jesus, the full expression of God and of humanity. This is what is meant by the imminence of God. Jesus showed us what it is to love; but more than that, everywhere he went is transformed by his presence, by Love incarnate: is set free from unloving. Anywhere he did not go could not be so redeemed. And so, in Jesus, God descends to pass through the world, the realm of the living; and descends further still to pass through the realm of the dead; and ascends again to pass through the heavens, the realm of the gods.

God is dead so that Jesus may be the Lord of the living and the dead, the redeemer of every realm.