“Between Cross and Resurrection,” by Alan E. Lewis

I am currently in a doctoral program, studying semiotics—cultural symbols—which requires a great deal of reading. Probably the greatest benefit of an education is the wise guide (teacher) who can give a curated tour of the best there is in any given subject, and such is the case with this program. Dr. Leonard Sweet has opened the door to an entire world of scholars and theologians who look beneath the surface of things and reveal mysteries. Now I would like to open that world to you.

… theology is the servant, not the master, of the story.

Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday, 165

This is the premise of Lewis’s book, that the accounts on record must not be molested by Jewish or Greek, or Latin, theology and philosophies that would warp the story to fit the mold.

Early on, Lewis talks about Jesus flipping the script with his parables, and in fact, as one of my favorite commentators, Alfred E. Edersheim, would attest, Jesus took familiar parables and gave them a new, unexpected, and usually shocking twist (pp. 22–23). That, I think, is what Lewis is hoping to do with this book.

Holy Abandonment?

An example early in the book that asks us to think hard about theology, doctrine, and the context of the story is found at the cross of Christ.

• Did the Father abandon the Son at the cross?
• Did God abandon Jesus as he died?
• Did Jesus die utterly alone?

I have gone through my own reconstruction of that question. I accepted that theology when I heard it preached as a young woman, even though it made me feel unsure and uncomfortable. The reason, I was told, that God turned God’s face away from Jesus as Jesus died on the cross, is because God cannot look upon sin, and in those hours, Jesus had become sin for us.

Really, though? Because how could God speak with Moses face-to-face? Or are we going to say that Moses was sinless? Or that God kept God’s eyes shut?

In my reconstruction, I hunted down the one passage that claims God cannot look upon sin and guess what. It is Habakkuk having a moment.

Habakkuk Having a Moment

Your eyes are too pure to behold evil,
     and you cannot look on wrongdoing;
 why do you look on the treacherous
     and are silent when the wicked swallow
     those more righteous than they?

Habakkuk 1:13 NRSVUE (emphasis added)

In other words, Habakkuk’s theology is that God is too pure to look upon evil, so why is God looking, then?

A Holy Whole

I had to figure it out for myself by thinking about the Trinity, and the nature of God, and the nature of Jesus. Eventually, I decided it was not possible for the trinity to be breached by such a separation. The story, set in its proper context, has Jesus crying out, “My God, my God,” triggering for the hearer the entirety of Psalm 22.

There is no way the original hearer would not have had that whole Psalm immediately in their head. The earth seizes, the sky goes dark, the dead are shaken from their graves, these are all the physical manifestations of cosmic power. Something is happening. It is God encountering death.

Saturday, everyone wakes up because God is still sustaining the universe by the power of God’s word.

But, God is also in the realm of the dead.

If I can figure God out completely, then the “god” I have got nailed is not actually God. So, that has been my theology for years, now. God died and yet God also remained. The eminent theologian and celebrated scholar Rudolf Bultmann offers a much more cogent way of understanding that.

Binary Ambiguity

It seemed to me that Lewis was arguing both sides of the issue—either Jesus was left abandoned at the cross and died alone, or God was fully present with Jesus and entered into death with Jesus.

Then, I began to wonder if the question itself, “either/or,” was playing into the Greek dualism Lewis is writing about.

Right before I got to the halfway mark of the book, Lewis unfolded the argument that death entered the Trinity through Jesus, and that in a very real way the passion of Christ was the passion of God, and perhaps takes place in eternity and we experience the cross, and Holy Saturday, and Resurrection Sunday in linear time because that is all we can do as corporeal creatures captured as we are in time’s dominion.

I wondered why God’s passion should even be a question to commentators. Any reader of the Bible knows God’s grief poignantly displayed in Genesis 6. God is described even of repenting from having made humankind, so agonized is the Lord over humanity’s corruption and degradation. God’s experience of death and loss goes even farther back, to Genesis 3 (which Lewis ever so briefly mentions). The God of the Hebrew Bible has always been deeply engaged with and deeply affected by human beings.

Untrammeled Story

There was another point, early in the book that I found myself unswayed by. Lewis wants for us to experience the first telling of the story, the horror and degradation of the cross, the awful finality of the tomb, the despair and emptiness of the Sabbath in between, and the shocking unexpectedness of the resurrection. But the Gospels themselves are written as retrospectives. The Gospel writers themselves do not tell the story in that way. Instead, all four Gospels make sure we the readers know that Jesus was plain-spoken in what was about to happen. Jesus spoke of his death, and he spoke of his resurrection. The original disciples simply did not have “ears to hear.” Well, that is to say, most of them. Evidently, Mary of Bethany (who is perhaps also Mary the Magdalene) knew.

Instead, and Lewis hints at this, Holy Saturday is more like Genesis 1, when the Spirit of God hovers over darkness and chaos, about to call forth life (p. 43). When Jesus died, that was an ending. The Sabbath that came the day after the cross, a time of rest, a pause, a “holy hush,” was also the numbing horror of loss for Jesus’s family, friends, and followers, What it must have looked like, for them, is Munsch’s “Silent Scream.”

But, just as in Genesis 1, when the Spirit hovered over deep, and God spoke a word, what was happening was unseen divine power changing everything. This is begun in the crucifixion, cosmic power shaking the universe loose and breaking free the dead, more earthquakes rocking the world all the way through to Jesus’s resurrection.

Where Did Death Go?

Lewis proposes not that God entered death, but rather death entered God, just as darkness enters light, and darkness simply cannot grasp, nor understand, nor overwhelm light (John 1:5).

… love triumphs in its confrontation with evil because it flowers, flourishes, increases, precisely by taking up death and absorbing lovelessness. Evil, on the contrary, intent upon destroying life and love, instead destroys itself.

Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday, 233

Theological Heavy Lifting

Lewis goes deep with such heady scholars as Karl Barth (1886–1968), Jürgen Moltmann (1926–2024), and Eberhard Jüngel (1934–2021). Now, disclaimer here, in the spirit of full disclosure. I have read very little of these theologians, just enough to get by, because as a rule, I find theoretical theology too … theoretical. I have always preferred Biblical theology over systematic theology. Lewis talks about the idolatry of doctrine—as opposed to dogma, I am sure (p. 140). But, as I read more of their ideas, I found myself drawn in.

Thoughts on the Nature of God

• Is the trinity “being that is becoming” (p. 229)?
• Is the revelation of God not so much a static figure (unchanging eternal) but an active figure?
• Is this what the core of James’ letter gets at, about faith needing to be dynamic, “bearing witness through praxis” (p. 217)?

I am intrigued with the idea that God loves because this is God’s being becoming, this is God deciding to be God, this is God’s nature at work.

The Need of God

I hadn’t really thought about it from the perspective offered by Jüngel, that as a device, “God” is no longer necessary to explain the world or to navigate and cope with the world for humans who have discovered their autonomy (pp. 237–239). And, in point of fact,

… the omnipotent God of the classical tradition is dead

Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday, 300, (italic added)

The Impassibility of God

Lewis is whittling away at the concept of God’s impassability. Instead, God is vulnerable, takes risks, and is fully present in creation, and with human beings. The author spends a lot of time talking about how the death of God was—and I am using my own words to summarize—the implosion of infinity with the finite, the force of life with the power of death. And I get that. That is John 1:5.

“To become fully human, God has shown us the truth of humanness, the way of being fully human as we never saw of lived it otherwise”

is to embrace the vulnerability and risk that God lives, in the power of love’s

“frail, selfless surrender”

Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday, 249, 253

That, too, is the Gospel of John, with a bit of Romans 12 thrown in.

By the end of chapter 8, it seemed Lewis was saying that for Christians, Holy Saturday lived in history is a movement towards community with each other and the earth. This is exactly what was ruptured in the Garden, and what the Spirit was (and is) now repairing through the death, harrowing, and resurrection of God.

It struck me as preternaturally prophetic (if that is not redundant) to read in a 25-year old book,

If ‘Easter Saturday’ connotes rupture and termination, a sense of darkness and disintegration, the loss of meaning, hope, and creativity, then our culture is surely to a significant degree an Easter Saturday society in the throes, wittingly or not, of its own demise

Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday, 341

Kenosis—An Emptying

At the same time, like Philippians 2, believers practice kenosis, a repudiating of self-sufficiency to live instead as the body of Christ, giving up personal freedoms in order to live in a global community as a whole, to engender “equality and equilibrium” (pp. 301, 328). Lewis means for Christians to embrace the emptying of ourselves just as Jesus did, both as individuals and as the Church at large.

The Church would empty itself of its wealth and power, its establishment, its accommodation to the culture (p. 360). Like Jesus, the Church would be in the world, but not of it, using the metaphor of being buried with the world in its death (pp. 348–349).

If the world we live in is in its Saturday, then we, as Christ, are buried in the world as the Spirit works in mighty power to bring forth life. We share in the world’s “pain and grief and guilt, its godlessness and godforsakenness, with a compassion and recklessness” as the servants of Jesus, as the buried Jesus, and as the resurrected Jesus (372).

Lewis puts it all together on page 388. The church is

1. “Christ’s buried, Easter Saturday body
2. “Participant in his regal servanthood within the world
3. “His prophetic proclamation to the world
4. “Christ’s priesthood, as sin’s victim and its victor
5. “Embodying both the mutual opposition between God and the world and the divine promise for the world’s renewal.”

But, we cannot live this as a divided body (pp. 392–393).

That we are united with God in death is not good news if we are not also united with God in life.

Moltmann, Barth, and Jüngel, through Lewis’s synthesis, present to us God who is being becoming. This is new, for God to enter into our death with us, and to bring us with God up into life through the resurrection. This is from glory to glory.

And how did this happen?

How did God do this?

Through the unifying power of the Holy Spirit (p. 299).