The faith of the Church is not in an aseptic, abstract God but in the God of Jesus Christ. The question of Christ and of God in the Scriptures are placed within the framework of salvation history. The Christian's (and Jews') concern is not primarily with God-in-himself, but with God-for-us, God-with-us. God is not ashamed to be called 'our God' (Heb 11,16). The revelation of God is a personal one, it is not a set of various truths but his self-disclosure and the revelation of his saving will for human beings. This historical self-disclosure of God occurs "in, with and under words and deeds" (1). The highest point and fulfilment of this self-disclosure is Jesus in whom personal content and historical form become identical. In him, the form is the form of God's radical self-communicating and self-emptying love. He is the supreme revelation of Immanuel. The response of faith is therefore the personal self-giving of man to God. It is much more than an acceptance of revealed truths and facts - it actively seeks the God who is personally revealing himself. "The basic form of faith is therefore not 'I believe something', but rather 'I believe you' and 'I believe in you'. A teaching that simply treats God in himself without saying what He means to me would be irrelevant. The concern is therefore with the concrete God who has revealed himself as the saviour of human beings, the hope and fulfilment of man.

Of course, this belief cannot avoid the question of the source and meaning of unmerited and unjust suffering. In one of José Maria Arguedas' novels, Todas las Sangres, the feelings of the poor are expressed by an old sacristan: "The God of the nobility is not fair. He allows suffering without consolation....Is God in the hearts of those who tore apart the body of the innocent teacher, Bellido?" The French poet Jacques Prevert puts the following prayer on the lips of unbelievers: "Our Father who art in heaven, stay there...." (2). The experience of suffering is not simply a peripheral aspect of existence but characterizes the human condition as such.

Contemporary theology therefore must dialogue with the suffering man who is conscious of the weakness and finitude of his existence. For suffering man, the quest for God is the quest for a divine compassion, an identification of God with his suffering and death. A God who redeems sin and suffering by an even greater love.

A basic answer to this profound hope is the person of Christ, who is, as Paul asserts, "the mystery of God" (Col 2,2) himself, the complete manifestation of God to the world. And the apex of this manifestation is the crucified Jesus. Paul, "would speak of nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Cor 2,2). If we take the testimony of the Gospels consistently, we would see that they are nothing but "passion narratives with extended introductions" as Kähler called them. The cross is therefore the very goal of the Incarnation, it is the meaning and purpose of the Christ-event. Kasper writes that "God would not have become truly a human being had he not entered fully into the abyss and night of death. But this means that we must approach the question of the nature of Jesus' divine sonship not from the vantage-point of his eternal and temporal birth but from that of his death on the cross. The starting-point of christological reflection must be the giving of the Son by the Father and the self-giving of the Son to the Father and for the many...." (3).

This christological approach is very well brought out by the christological hymn quoted by Paul in his letter to the Philippians. It speaks of the kenosis or emptying of Christ who "was in the form of God... (and) ... took the form of a slave" (Phil 2, 6.7). Of course, this kenosis does not mean a de-divinization of God for as Paul says, "God, in Christ, was reconciling the world to himself" (2 Cor 5, 19).

And it is in this light that I would like to speak about the mysterious cry of abandonment uttered by Jesus on the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mt 27, 46; Mk 15, 34). This cry is the key to understanding the Passion Event.

In Jesus Forsaken, God, in order to save and fulfil man feels abandoned by God! He reaches to man precisely and paradoxically where man is furthest from God. In this kenosis because of love He embraces and consumes every sin and brokenness. The emptyness with which evil and sin infect man and creation is transformed into kenotic love. In Jesus forsaken one can see God in his greatest self-emptying. It is His greatest self-surrendering love in which He identifies Himself with the least of men, becoming "sin" and "a curse" for us "so that in Him we might become the uprightness of God" (cf. 2 Cor 5, 21 and Gal 3, 13-14).

Jesus is the one who "bore our infirmities" and endured our sufferings (Is 53, 4), the one on whom the Lord "laid the guilt of us all" (Is 53, 6). Therefore every suffering face, every innocent suffering countenance is His. The sufferings one experiences today were borne by Jesus then; they mystically unite the person to Him who bears them. It is through a perichoresis (4) of the past with the present that reveals itself in a new future that they are intertwined and are one in Christ. Therefore, when one embraces the present sufferings, he/she embraces Jesus on the cross in them. Our sufferings therefore receive a new visage, that of Jesus on the cross. When one starts to live in this way, he/she makes a great discovery: that of this "man of suffering ... spurned and avoided by men" (Is 53, 3).

It is here that love reveals its admirable ontology: having given everything for love of the Father and of his creatures, the Son receives everything from the Father in the Easter-Event - God became man so that in Him and with Him, man might become God. God took on the form of man so that man might take the form of God.

This was expressed by Chiara Lubich (5) in the following meditation:

" We would die if we did not look at you, who transformed, as if by magic, every bitterness into sweetness; at you, crying out on the cross, in the greatest suspense, in total inactivity, in a living death, when, sunk in the cold, you hurled your fire upon the earth, and reduced to infinite stillness, you cast your infinite life to us, who now live it in rapture......

Another prospect can be opened and explored here. In his forsakenness, the Son of God, who is and who remains God (and therefore a Person of the Trinity), in carrying the movement of kenosis initiated with the Incarnation, passes through the experience of inhuman individuality. The divine Person is so to speak, kept in the shade in His humanity, while solitude, separation (and the rejection of the One as a result of sin) and all that which is not 'person' (6) is experienced in all their devastating intensity. In making this reality His and suffering for love, the Son of God while giving Himself wholly to the Father, transforms it so that in Him it becomes "person": that is reciprocal love. As He communicates the extent of absolute self-giving that is Love to his humanity, the Christ causes the creative power of God to rush into our emptiness. We are wrenched from our closed individuality and made persons in the one Person of the Son. Jesus calls us all to blossom as persons in Him, so that we are truly ourselves.

I here would like to quote one of the great theologians of the Orthodox Church, Sergej Bulgakov:

"The first-born, before the advent of sin, although being a determinate person, a concrete I, had in himself the fullness of humanity, he was the complete man in whom in fact mankind with all its possible personalities lived. In such a sense, Adam though being a person, did not possess individuality in the negative, limiting sense of the word (i.e. the evil multiplicity of egocentrism as a result of scattered unity). Our fallen humanity recognises personality as individual. We do not know individuality otherwise,.... But it was not so in the beginning, in the sapiential image of man. Here the personality must be transparent...: all in everyone and each one in everyone; this is the ontology of personality. In Adam, due to sin, the image of complete man was clouded, he became a mere individuality, who could only generate other individualities. And the first of the sons of Adam was Cain, in whom egocentrism showed itself with all its force, resulting in fratricide.... A similar individuality is bound to original sin, with the loss of the sapiential image of man. But in the New Adam (Jesus) this sapiential image of man is realized and evil individuality is overcome ('I do not do my will, but that of the Father who has sent me'; 'He who wants to follow me must deny himself': these are the principles of the new life in Christ)." (7)

And our lives as human persons enter here. Jesus in his abandonment shows us that to be is to love. He showed us that one is, when he/she is not, because this is Love. So the gift that God gives us of our person is one that we must offer Him back, losing it so as to have it again from Him, but this time through Jesus, in God himself. In this way in Christ we live the life of the Trinity (8).

Through Jesus Forsaken, the most negative realities are transformed into the most positive (Love is, when it is not). He transformed suffering which is negative into love. On the cross, God's self-renouncing love is embodied with ultimate radicalness. The cross and especially the abandonment is the utmost that is possible to God in his self-surrendering love. To borrow a phrase from Anselm, it is "that than which nothing greater can be thought". This love awakens in us the will for a proportional reply: love for us becomes the re-living of Jesus forsakenness, transforming suffering through a divine alchemy, into love as he did. This is where we will find our real being.

I will end with a quotation from the first letter of Peter:

"Bow humbly under God's mighty hand..." that is, take up your cross, your weakness, your darkness, your nothingness...

"... so that in due time he may lift you high" (1 Pt 5, 6).

The Crucified is our only light and our only hope. It is true that He is the source of strength, of hope, of joy-filled reality.

"Only the crucified Christ can bring the freedom which changes the world.... In his time the crucified Christ was regarded as a scandal and as foolishness. (Today too the 'logic' of the crucifixion is a reversal of human logic). Yet only when men are reminded of him, however untimely this may be, can they be set free..., and be offered a future that will never grow dark again.... God in (suffering) and (suffering) in the crucified God - that is the basis for a real hope which both embraces and overcomes the world, and the ground for a love which is stronger than death and can sustain death. It is the ground for living with (suffering), and nevertheless remaining in love and meeting what comes in openness for God's future. It is the ground for living and bearing guilt and sorrow for the future of man in God" (9).

Notes

(1) Kasper, W., The God of Jesus Christ, p.121

(2) Gutiérrez, G., God-talk during Ayacucho

(3) Kasper, W., The God of Jesus Christ, p.189

(4) This word, in Greek meaning 'to come to in succession' is here used in the sense of 'the mutual presence of one in the other'.

(5) Lubich, Chiara, Meditations, New City, London, 1989, p.30

(6) Here the 'person' is being understood as a relationship of love, the person being him/her self in Other.

(7) Bulgakov Sergej, L'Agnello di Dio quoted in Zanghí, G.M., Nuova Umanità, XVIII (1996),Vol. 1, Alcuni Cenni su Gesù Abbandonato, pp. 33-39.

(8) The crucified Christ and especially Jesus forsaken is seen always to a greater extent, as the complete revelation of the profoundity of God in himself. The event of the cross which culminates in the abandonment is always more internalized in the inter-Trinitarian life, as the revealing event that lights up the intimacy in which God is himself and that introduces us into it. The time of the Church, therefore becomes the time of consummation of this agape, the consummation of Love that gives itself and love that receives itself - the time of the Spirit who leads to the fullness of truth (Jn 16, 13) in that unthought of and unthinkable 'unceasing ancient newness' that continuously upsets the horizons of our consciousness, as Paul VI said, which is already given as a reality that gushes out from within us (Jn 4, 14).

(9) Moltmann, J. The Crucified God, SCM Press Ltd., London, 1984, pp.1 and 278.