The humiliated God
By Matthias Drobinski
As bad as your opinion about Mel Gibson's film of the passion of Jesus Christ may be, he made two things clear: the death of Jesus was a beastly affair, and in the Christian reports about this death Jews make a bad impression. The beginnings of the Christianity are thus marked by violence. The violence, suffered by Jesus on the cross, violence, which suffered again and again by Christians because of their religion. Then on top of this, in a bitter story of an abuse of the cross, the violence of Christians against Jewish "murderers of the God" and against anybody, who stood in the way of their crusades. The violent origin of the Christianity seems nearly forgotten. There's good reasons, however, to remember again these origins. Not because of some motion picture. It is because the violence has returned into the Christian West, with an intensity, that until recently nobody could have imagined.
Nothing can match the cross as a sign of violence. In the antiquity the cross was more that just an execution device; it was a sign of deterrence, with the condemned perishing slowly, in a painful and disgraceful fashion. The crucifixion was a method of the state terror, with the intention of a complete destruction of the delinquent, his human being, his dignity. That Jesus died on the cross, is the outrage of Christianity. The Christian God, screaming in desperation: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?", delivered into the hands of the Roman occupation. This thought is very strange to Buddhists, Muslims and Jews, but also Christians had their problems with it. In the art of the Middle Ages they let the Crucified stand upright in front of the cross as a pain-free ruler of the world. Modern theologians pushed the death on the cross to the edges of Christianity and moved the learning and ambling life of Jesus into the foreground instead,. as if his execution were just some stupid coincidence.
The humiliated God is the core of the Christianity. Because he exposes himself to the pain, he gets close to the suffering and dishonored; for the Christianity the pain is not an expression of an incomplete consciousness as in the Buddhism, it is an element of the human experience. The crucified God suffers with suffering mankind. That's why Friedrich Nietzsche was so mad about the fact, Christianity is a compassion religion; the compassion contradicts Nietzsche's picture of the Übermensch, who creates himself through his own strength and glory. A God on the cross is the sharpest possible contrast to the idolatry of power and success, to the fantasies of a produced-by-a-plan perfection of the mankind, living without pain and in doubt forever; it is the counter plan to a world order, which knows just winners and losers, but no victims.
The humiliated God also stands for the Christian understanding of human rights. Jesus' suffering is not a self purpose, it is not some scary show to rattle weak hearts. According to Christian theory Jesus, through his suffering, triumphed over death. Therefore Christianity is not a religion of pain and suffering, it is a religion of salvation; herein lies the big theological misunderstanding of the blood-splattered film. Christianity does not know any resignation when facing violence. Through its founder's death on the cross it rather develops a vision of reality beyond the violence, where the dignity and the uniqueness of every single human being are inviolable, where he is free and equal, living in a democratic and just society.
It is typical for all utopias, that something naive sticks to them. Given the facts, that in New York more than 3000 innocent died in the WTC rubble and further 200 were killed in the Madrid commuter trains, is it not the immediate job right now the war against the terror and its supporters? Doesn't Christian Europe weaken itself by talking about the compassion and the dignity, even for those, who in doubt would spit on it? On the other hand: What would the Christian West, so often mentioned in the anti-terror speeches, have to save and to defend against the Islamic terror, if it cut off its own roots?
The humiliated God on the torture stake, on the garbage dump outside the Jerusalem gates, is the counter-plan for the terror, that wants to kill the unbelievers and subjugate the believers to the dictatorship of God. In addition, it is also the counter-plan to the crusader's policies of George W. Bush, against all wars, which claim to be against "evil" and thereby cause evil to happen. That the Christians stand on the side of their humiliated God and their hope for a saved world, will not abolish wars or make police action against terrorists superfluous. Also, it will not save Christians from painful realizations of their own violent history against apostates, Jews and Muslims. But it can help Europe keep those values, which terrorists want to destroy.
A vision, yes: but a people without a vision can not survive. These are not words of some naive world improver, it was the wise king Salomon, who said so 3000 years ago.
Source: Süddeutsche Zeitung Nr.83, Thursday, den 08. April 2004 , Page 4
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