God is dead – Good Friday 2025
Marian Free
In the name of God who, in Jesus, identified with humanity to the point of death. Amen.
“Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” A core component of Christian faith is that Jesus actually dies. Taken to a literal end point, God dies with Jesus on the cross. From three in the afternoon on Friday to sometime during the night on Saturday evening there is an absence – an absence felt physically by Jesus’ friends and disciples. An absence that I believe we are meant to feel in our hearts and in our bones. From that moment on Good Friday when the gospel is read until that moment on Sunday morning when we declare: “Christ is risen”, we are confronted with the harsh reality that Jesus, God among us, was put to death and that for something like 36 hours, Jesus’ lifeless body lay in a tomb. Jesus/God was truly dead.
As we wait – in this time of emptiness – we have an opportunity to experience the absence of God – in Gaza, in Ukraine, in the prisons where people are tortured and killed because they challenged the authority of the state, in the favelas of Brazil, the townships of South Africa and the slums of Mumbai and in the Congo and the countless other places in which war, civil strife, injustice and poverty shout out that God is dead, that God is impotent to bring about lasting change.
In the dramatization of the gospel on Good Friday we acknowledge our complicity in the death of Jesus. We take the part of the crowd demanding: “Crucify him! Crucify him!” In so doing, we acknowledge our complicity in the death of Jesus/God in the world today. Our collective unwillingness to pay the cost of change that would lead to peace, equity and justice makes us uncomfortable with “revolutionaries” like Jesus, such that we join the cry for their removal – condemning Jesus to his death. Our collective belief that somehow we can solve the dilemmas of the world, pushes God to margins, denies God the ability to act – sends Jesus to the cross. Our focus on our own needs and our belief that collectively we have the tools to solves the world’s problems proclaims that we do not need God – keeps Jesus in the tomb.
During the time between our Good Friday observances and our Easter Day celebrations, we acknowledge that God is powerless in the face of human greed, greed that leads to a desire for power and control, greed that demands an unfair share of the world’s resources, greed that ensures one’s own well-being before the needs of others. We recognise our complicity in the state of the world today and we grieve the ways in which we have disempowered and marginalised God through our action (or more likely through our inaction).
If God is dead, it is because we put God to death. It is a burden we need to carry especially today.
Thank God we know the end of the story.
May we commit ourselves to resurrection life – ours and that of others – that God’s power and love may be effective in the world and God’s presence shine light into the darkness.
Swallowsrest 