God is not in heaven: he is hanging on the cross.
Love is not an otherworldly, intruding, self-asserting power—
and to meditate on the cross can mean to take leave of that dream
Dorothee Sölle
On This Gallows
(blooming wild shrubs / Julie Cook / 2016)
There is a sobering reaccounting of a tale by Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz turned author and activist, taken from his book Night.
The tale is found within Dorothee Sölle’s reflection On This Gallows and is here, paraphrased…
Mr. Wiesel recounts one of many tragic episodes…of how several SS guards rounded up the camp’s prisoners and hung three of their members in front of them…for no apparent reason but that they could.
Two of the victims were grown men and the third was but a boy.
Mr Wiesel notes how quickly the two men died but not so for the young boy.
He struggled and suffered for nearly thirty minutes before succumbing to the slow torturous strangulation.
As Mr Wiesel stood, witnessing this numbing atrocity in a long line of atrocities, he hears a voice from behind him coming from the assembled crowd…
“Where is God? Where is he?”
As the boy struggles, he hears again…
“Where is God now!”
Mr Wiesel and the other prisoners were gathered to witness another round of senseless deaths.
But this time it all seems so much more barbaric, completely incomprehensible.
A boy slowly and horrifically dies…
A single vocalized lamentation, representing the silent question screaming in the hearts of all those gathered…how, why, where…. is offered up to the empty void of hopelessness…
As the single answer is heard echoing within Mr Wiesel’s head…
“Here he is—He is hanging here on this gallows…”
And so He is…
He is here now…just as He was then…
God is indeed in the midst of each and every horror and atrocity.
He is present in each and every lonely pain filled moment of agony and emptiness.
He is every bit a part of our struggles as we are ourselves…
He is not watching coldly from some remote vantage point as so many imagine.
Not as some maniacal puppeteer who finds sick and twisted pleasure watching the suffering of those so far removed.
He is not far removed…
Quite the contrary…
He is in the unimaginable
the unspeakable
the horrific
the sorrow
the agony…
He was given up…
to suffer
to share alongside us in our suffering
to hang on a cross
to die along side each one of us…
As we in turn, are now allowed to rise with Him…
In His final vanquishing of death…
I will not die but live,
and will proclaim what the Lord has done.
Psalm 118:17
cookiecrumbstoliveby 