Johnny Cash and the Carter Family, in 1962, singing Were You There When They Crucified My Lord? Click here to go to YouTube or play below.

From Psalm 22 (Revised Standard Version):

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry by day, but thou dost not answer;
and by night, but find no rest.
Yet thou art holy,
enthroned on the praises of Israel.
In thee our fathers trusted;
they trusted, and thou didst deliver them.
To thee they cried, and were saved;
in thee they trusted, and were not disappointed.
But I am a worm, and no man;
scorned by men, and despised by the people.
All who see me mock at me,
they make mouths at me, they wag their heads;
“He committed his cause to the LORD; let him deliver him,
let him rescue him, for he delights in him!”
Yet thou art he who took me from the womb;
thou didst keep me safe upon my mother’s breasts.
Upon thee was I cast from my birth,
and since my mother bore me thou hast been my God.
Be not far from me,
for trouble is near
and there is none to help.

…

From what many would call Richard John Neuhaus’s masterwork, “Death on a Friday Afternoon,” I hope I can be forgiven for taking the liberty of an extended quote today:

Versions of the story in which Jesus was not really killed appeared very early and are remarkably enduring. Raymond Brown observes that people who have never bothered to study the New Testament Gospels “are fascinated by the report of some ‘new insight’ to the effect he was not crucified or did not die, especially if his subsequent career involved running off with Mary Magdalene to India.” According to Irenaeus, already in the first century there was a Gnostic tale in circulation that Simon of Cyrene, the fellow who was compelled to help Jesus carry the cross, was the one who ended up on it. Another Gnostic story was that Jesus had a twin brother who was crucified. Others said Jesus’ body was crucified while the real Jesus, being purely spiritual, was untouched. And so the variations on this theme multiplied.

The Qur’an also denies that Jesus was crucified, claiming that it was a double or a counterfeit who died on the cross. Devout Muslims claim that Muhammed received that intelligence directly from God. Various plots and conspiracy theories have been promoted under diverse auspices. In some of them Jesus connives with Judas Iscariot in what amounts to a grand publicity stunt. Still being read today is H.J. Schonfield’s The Passover Plot, which, in the name of the “latest scholarship,” advances that thesis. (According to Schonfield, the stunt backfired, because Jesus later died of the spear wound received on the cross.)

I do not suggest for a moment that most Christians indulge in these fantastical stories that literally deny the death of Jesus. But there are many ways of denying his death, and ours. The gnostic impulse is still very much with us. We draw back from looking long and hard into the heart of darkness; we recoil from the brute facticity of the horror; we are scandalized by the truth that we worship a crucified God. As well we should be.

The core of the gnostic impulse is the belief that we are not really part of the creation, that we are not really creatures. Put differently, it is the refusal to accept the fact that we are not God. Remember the original temptation in the garden, how it came with the promise, “You will be like God.” So what is wrong with that? someone might respond. Isn’t that precisely our human calling and destiny, to be like God? After all, the “beatific vision” is perfect communion with God, which is the full restoration of the “image and likeness of God” in which we human beings are created. Yes, but the quintessence of original sin, as it is also reflected in gnosticism, is the desire to be like God on our own terms. It is to deny our status as creatures and assume that we can be like God by nature rather than by the gift of divine grace.

God’s identification with us in Christ is most dramatically acted out on the cross where a creature dies, as all we creatures will surely die. Note that in everyday language the word “creature” is hardly ever used today except negatively. Horror movies have creatures from the deep, and we speak of bothersome insects as creatures, but most people would not call their pet dog a creature, never mind their best friend. This is a triumph of gnosticism in our popular culture. It is the most elementary fact about what and who we are — creatures. We are not the Creator; we are not God. Balthasar writes:

This not-being-God of the creature must be maintained as the most fundamental fact of all. That God is God: this is the most immense and absolutely unsurpassable thought. It says to me (if it has really struck home to me in the deepest part of my being), with an absolute evidence that can never be gainsaid, that I myself, to the very marrow of my existence, am not God.

“God became man.” “The Word became flesh.” “Incarnation.” The words are so familiar to Christians that we become dulled to the astonishing things they say. The cross shocks and scandalizes and reastonishes, and never more so than in the cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Here is opened up the unfathomable distance between creature and Creator.

[...]

Our gnostic consciousness-raising flights, our attunement to “the inner child,” our following of our bliss, our pious sensations of at-one-ness with the All — these are soaring escapes from our creatureliness. We are not little sparks of the Divine who have by some cosmic mishap fallen into the mud and matter of creation. We are the very stuff of creation. We are not God.

As with the creature on the cross, we cry out to God.

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