We tend to think God backwards. In large part, it’s due to how we are bound to entropy’s forward-firing arrow. Sequence is basic to how we understand and interact with the stuff of our world. It’s often how we discern causes and track development: babies grow into toddlers into teenagers into adults, and the procession can only be understood by following the trajectory from one phase to the next.
But sequence can be misleading at times. A detective in a murder mystery has to dialectically unravel appearances in order to arrive at the truth that precedes everything. Or more prosaically, an argument between spouses seems to ignite over the trash not being taken out when in truth the garbage fail simply re-ignited a tension that has already been there for some time. To focus simply on what does or doesn’t exonerate the one responsible for the garbage is to miss the point and not get to the heart of the matter.
Many of us think of God principally as the Creator of everything. He is that, of course, and the creation is the setting of the stage for everything to come. It’s hardly trivial. But if we presume that the act of creation is what most determines who God is, it becomes easier to view God’s subsequent acts as attempts at damage control as they are then subservient to and derivative from that act. The further out in time we get from the creation, then, the more we are left to wonder if what God does actually reflects what he most is or is simply the latest jury rigged effort to forestall disaster. Proceeding accordingly, we may even be tempted to treat Holy Week as one more episode in the sequence that begins with the creation, rather than the central thing that funds all else God does. Indeed, this front-to-back approach to understanding God has thing the wrong way around.
The heart of Karl Barth’s dogmatic program was to show how the events of Holy Week were not linear expansions of who God is, but the heart of his identity:
In the beginning, before time and space as we know them, before creation, before there was any reality distinct from God which could be the object of the love of God or the setting for his acts of freedom, God anticipated and determined within himself (in the power of his love and freedom, of his knowing and willing) that the goal and meaning of all his dealings with the as yet non-existent universe should be the fact that in his Son he would be gracious towards man, uniting himself with him.
Along these lines, Wesley Hill has exegetically shown how God’s selfhood, as described in Paul’s letter to the Romans, is inseparable from the sending of the Son into the world and, farther back, to his binding himself to the frauds and failures that populate the world he has created. The descriptions Paul uses in this chapter, particularly in verses 8:11 (“he who raised Christ Jesus”) and 8:32 (“he who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all”) do more than assert that God has done these things. They concretely identify the God from whom humanity is alienated and for whom the identification of God is a question. These descriptions mark out this One as the meaning of the word, “God.” But even more than that, by linking these descriptions to the purpose clause of v. 3 (“By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin”), Paul lays bare the heart of God.
Paul retrojects this complex divine action of giving up and raising Jesus back into the identity of God prior to its temporal outworking in the human life of Jesus. It is not simply that God has been identified in one way (as, e.g., the creator [1:25] or the God who made promises to Abraham [9:7]) and is now identified as the one who sent his son (8:3) and raised him from the dead (v. 11). Instead, this latter, Christological divine action determines Paul’s understanding of God’s purpose as it was prior to the Christ-event (v. 29) […]
What is disallowed here, as in Romans 4, is a two-stage identification of God, whereby Paul might conceive of certain pre-Christian designations of God (e.g. the one who “predestined” [8:29] or “called” [v. 30] Israel and the Gentiles) as bearing validity in their own right until the sending of the Son at a particular point, after which time God may then, newly, be identified in some other way (i.e., by reference to Jesus). If God’s foreordination of the Gentiles, already discernible in Scripture, is oriented toward establishing the Son as “firstborn among many brothers” (8:29b), then no such stages may be delineated. God is, from the time before the sending of the Son, the God whose identity is bound up with the Son. God’s Christological aim in God’s foreknowledge enables Paul to discern a Christ-oriented identity of God prior to the Christ-event. God does not become what God was not, for Paul does not know a time when God was not already the God who would send his Son so that believers might be conformed to his image.
However much one might be tempted to see the Biblical narrative overwise, the cross and resurrection are the non-negotiable manifestation of what God most fundamentally is. He isn’t first the God who created or the being who possesses certain attributes: he is the God who elects to be with the human race in union with them.
This means that God holds nothing of himself back in the accomplishment of redemption for sinful creatures. There is nothing stingy or resentful in his self-giving. There is no disappointment on his part to find that the humiliation and death of the Son was for — well, us. Are we not often afraid that the death of Christ might be viewed as “not worth it” when God takes inventory of the sorry flotsam he’s gathered up? Hill’s exegesis renders more visible the total investment of God’s being and character in the rescue and restoration of sinners. There is nothing hidden behind his back, nothing, therefore, that could negate or overturn his surrender to and subsequent victory over Death.
The stark reversal of Holy Week, from the laudatory celebration of Palm Sunday to Good Friday’s repeated shouts of “crucify him!” shows what is in the human race: the contradiction, the hypocrisy, the irrationality, the myopic death drive. But it also shows what is in the man Jesus Christ, who accepts the adulation of the crowds as he enters the city of David knowing it will swiftly dissolve and calcify into condemnation. Good Friday isn’t a tackle Jesus found himself blindsided by, but neither is it an obligation he was begrudgingly bound by scruple to honor after being fooled by his reception at the beginning of the week. Creation and its preservation has always been in service to this: the definitive substantiation of God’s love.
What transpires during Holy Week is the occurrence in history of who and what God is. For while the death of the Son of God could be nothing more than the final certification of how irredeemable we are, it instead renders the love of God not simply a concept or a quality but an accomplishment. From before the beginning he comprehended the disappointments of the race for whom he would die and unreservedly elected himself not to be God without them.
The events of Good Friday, then, are not a last, desperate option taken to stop a runaway train or to contain a wreck. It was what God endeavored to do from before the very beginning. Before God ever said, “Let there be light,” his purpose was for everything to come into place so that he could walk these streets, be scourged with these whips, and carry this cross to die on this hill.
God took on creaturehood so that he could become weighed down by all. There is never a time when God did not intend to encumber himself with our failures and frailties because there is never a time he has not loved us. But one week in human history, that love went to the uttermost as every anticipation was actualized in Jerusalem. Love traversed the death our species had destined for itself in God’s submission of himself to rupture and ruin. It’s what God has always purposed to do. For everyone, for me, and for you.
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Woah! What a beautiful Holy Week reminder. It’s so easy to slip into our linear projection but I love what you said, “ From before the beginning he comprehended the disappointments of the race for whom he would die and unreservedly elected himself not to be God without them.” that’s wild God creating with a knowledge of the pain and suffering he would endure and choosing to do it anyway because of Love.