God is Dead: Silent Saturday

“God is dead…And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives.”

 
Between the cross and the resurrection sits Silent Saturday. A day too dark for words, a day too important to forget. At least today, Nietzsche is right. The worst thing has happened: God in Jesus is dead, and we killed him. 
 
Growing up in evangelicalism, I do not remember commemorating Silent Saturday, or Good Friday now that I think about it. These two days are too dark, too real, too uncomfortable for a religion rooted in triumphalism to fully comprehend. Maybe it was my lack of suffering that made it so damn insufferable to wait with baited breath on a brown, beaten God to rise. There are even a few mega-churches here in Colorado Springs celebrating Easter tonight. As my friend Thom told me yesterday, “I have found that most evangelical traditions skip the solemnity. They want the triumph, not the journey to get there. Indeed, I found Easter in those traditions to be more of a game of Monopoly, where they get a quick ‘get out of jail free’. There is so little understanding or reflection of the horror of what happened.” Not only the horror of what happened, but what this crime reveals about the nature and character of God. 
 
Because what Silent Saturday reveals is not a triumphant, dominator God, but a God most fully known as an abandoned, brutalized, defenseless brown man lying naked on a cold slab. Today exposes God at his worst, or maybe at God’s best. 
 
And here’s the most damning thing. Whenever we turn an apathetic eye toward suffering, we kill him again. As he told us, “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me.” In abandonment and shame, God is identified with the nameless bodies tossed in Bucha’s mass graves. This brown body, another victim of police brutality, looks like Walter Scott, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, and Botham Jean. God the immigrant from Nazareth fleeing political unrest is a kid in a cage at our border. Jesus the homeless man is a transgender teen kicked out of their house by evangelical parents. God the unplanned baby comes to us as a pregnant Hispanic girl in Texas with a bounty on her head in Texas. God in Christ dead killed by state-sanctioned violence lays in the grave next to the countless children Republican lawmakers are willing to sacrifice in their worship of the almighty gun. Jesus dead at the hands of religious fundamentalism is a victim of his own religious deconstruction. Behold the man. Behold your God. Behold what happens both then and now when you stand in solidarity with the oppressed.

If you struggle to love God, to trust God, to believe God is good, then look at God today. See God fully exposed, defenseless and dead, lying in solidarity with the nameless millions of souls crushed by violence, empire, purity culture, and religion. This is Emmanuel, the One who is still with us in our pain, in our sorrow, in our abandonment, and yes, even in our death.

Amen.

Gary Alan Taylor