Shape and Substance

On this most somber of days in the liturgical year, I will step aside and yield this space to the late William Placher. Near the end of his book, The Triune God: Essays in Post-Liberal Theology (Westminster John Knox, 2007), he speculates a bit about the moment of the crucifixion of Jesus and the latter’s cry from the cross (actually a quote from the Aramaic version of Psalm 22:1), Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani (“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”). Placher writes:

We trust that the distance between Jesus crying out in abandonment on the cross and the one he had always before called his Father mirrors some sort of distance within God—though we cannot imagine what terms like “distance within God” can mean. A kind of space lies within the triune God—a space potentially inclusive of the space of sinners and doubters—and yet this space is no desert but a spiritual garden mutual love and glorification. In the incarnation, the three show that there is always within God a space large enough for the whole world and even all its sin: the Word’s distance from the one he calls Father is so great that no one falls outside it, and the Spirit fills all that space with love. The Spirit maintains, Balthasar says, the space that Christ opens up “at our disposal, as a new, open space.” The Spirit fills the “space… between the Begotten and the Unbegotten,” Gregory of Nazianzus wrote. As Moltmann puts it, “In the even between the sundering Father and the forsaken Son, God becomes so ‘vast’ in the Spirit of self-offering that there is room and life for the whole world, the living and the dead (Placher, The Triune God: Essays in Postliberal Theology, pp.155-156).

May you find the emptiness opened this day (and, indeed, every day) for you.