The Day That God Dies
In Christianity, the Friday after Passover is observed as the day when God dies. Nietzsche famously said that “God is dead,” suggesting that the modern world has killed the idea of God. He also called for the creation of something he called anti-theism, which is a world without Gods.
Christianity breaks down into three categories. There’s the Jesus story. It’s the narrative of how one man was born, lived, and died, murdered while yet an innocent, and then was born again. There’s the Jesus philosophy, which is “love thy neighbor,” “Do not judge lest ye be judged.” “Do unto others,” etc. The philosophy works pretty solidly without the Jesus story or the third part, which is Christian Mysticism.
According to Christian Mysticism, Jesus is both God and the Son of God. His death, while innocent, fulfills the debt mankind has to their creator, and thus he is reborn, offering the potential of rebirth to us all.
Joseph Campbell, the English professor, not my brother, called this the “dying-and-rising-God” story, and it’s an essential part of his hero cycle theory. The dying and rising God is perhaps the oldest myth. It’s evident in many cultures in stories like Horus and Hercules, long before the Jesus story appears in the Jewish culture. There’s even a theory that the Hercules story was so popular in the first-century Roman world that elements of it merged into the Jesus story, and Hercules worshipers became Christian worshipers.
This is sometimes called “The Agricultural Myth,” as it reflects the cycle of planting seeds, which grow, we harvest, they die, and then we plant new seeds, repeating the cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. Because they didn’t write, we have scant clues as to what sort of myths and beliefs pre-agricultural people had, but I suspect the dying and rising God story would be familiar to them as every day they see the sun rise, it travels across the sky, sinks into the death of night, then the next morning is born again. This idea of dying and rising again is evident everywhere life exists.
Some people think that comparative mythology is atheism. It’s at most agnosticism, which I tend to believe everybody shares. No matter how hard you try, I don’t believe human beings can either completely not believe or completely believe. We’re not made that way. You may use different words to describe it, but you believe in something, even if it’s science. Trust me, science fuels my agnosticism too.
We tend to think of the word “myth” as meaning “not true.” That’s not accurate. Myths are stories of the gods, or the God. Whether you believe in these stories as “true” or not is a separate issue.
Some people point to the repetition of the dying-and-rising-God story as evidence that the Jesus story is something we made up. CS Lewis believed that the Jesus story was the one true “ultimate” myth, and all other myths prepare people to accept the Jesus story and the Jesus experience. TW Lewis taught something similar when I took New Testament at Millsaps.
I tend to focus on the “death of the innocent” part of the Good Friday story. I don’t think there’s been a day in human creation where there wasn’t the death of an innocent. Building concentration camps in El Salvador, I’m worried that our nation may soon be involved in the death of innocents. We’ve done it before. There’s a movement to remove slavery and the Trail of Tears from our history books because it makes people hate America. I know these stories pretty well, and I don’t hate America. You can love people who make imperfect decisions that hurt people. We all have.
The cross was a religious symbol long before the first century. It represents the conjunction of opposing forces. In the Christian story, it represents the conjunction of life and death, creating the opportunity for rebirth.
Tomorrow celebrates the day in the Jesus story where Jesus goes down into the place where unforgiven souls exist, battles the adversary, and frees the innocent, allowing for the possibility of human rebirth. Most Christians don’t actually celebrate that part of the story, although it seems terribly important to me.
The third day, the third part of the birth-death-rebirth cycle, Jesus returns from rescuing the condemned and walks the earth again. Seeking to anoint and dress the body of her dead child, Mary and Mary Magdalene are met by two men who say, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”
In St. Peter’s Basilica, there’s a Carrara marble statue carved by Michelangelo Buonarroti in 1499. It’s called “Madonna della Pietà,” Italian for “our lady of pity.” It represents Mary, the Mother of God, holding her dead son as he’s taken down from the cross.
The wounds on his body, the holes in his hands and feet, and the wound made by the spear in his chest are visible. It’s considered one of the most powerful and most sensitive sculptures ever made. All that happens today. An innocent man, who is also God, who is also the Son of God, gives up his life for us, and his mamma cried.
