Meditation on the Crucified God

If you are a believer observing Easter this weekend, I invite you to meditate on the crucified God today. Some preachers say something like, "We can rejoice even today, because we know Easter Sunday is coming - Christ is risen!" But I invite you to forget about that for a moment and to fully immerse yourself in the experience of the death of God today. Try to feel the existential dread the first followers of Christ must have felt when they saw him dying on that cross and heard him say "My God, my God - why have you forsaken me?" Fully feel that void - the utter disorientation, and the crumbling of your entire worldview.

Paradoxically, it is in this experience of groundlessness - of fully feeling the absence of God - that we are most at one with Christ. The glorious, powerful, miracle-making, death-defeating God is something wholly Other and utterly foreign to my lived experience - something that I, at least, cannot connect to anymore. The lonely God, the betrayed God, the broken God, the crucified God - that is the one I recognize.