The late renowned Nobel laureate and Jewish writer Elie Wiesel once wrote a short memoir entitled Night. He recounts his experience with his father in the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944-45, at the height of the Holocaust and towards the end of World War II.
In that heartbreaking memoir, overflowing with so much innocent suffering, Wiesel recounts a story that is deeply moving. During the hanging of a child, which the camp is forced to watch, he hears someone ask: “Where is God? Where is he?” Not heavy enough for the weight of his body to break his neck, the boy dies slowly and in agony. Wiesel files past him, sees his tongue still pink and his eyes clear, and weeps.
“Behind me, I heard the same man asking: ‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Here he is – he is hanging here on this gallows’.”
It is important we Christians humbly admit we have no easy response to the mystery of evil. Like Job, we can only fall silent before its full horror. We certainly do not have easy ‘answers’. Perhaps, we can only simply just point to the person of Jesus on the Cross and weep.
For the Cross is certainly not the violent retribution of God who demands ‘satisfaction for our sins’. That would make God into some type of sadistic monster. No! As early Church Father Irenaeus noted, God “does not use violent means to obtain what he desires.” It is we human beings who are violent. The Bible is very clear that it is not God who is crucifying Jesus, it is us!
Instead, the Cross mysteriously reveals God’s immense love and compassion for every single person. Jesus, our brother, died in solidarity with – and in loving communion with – all human failure, mistakes and absurdity, and thus made them non-absurd.
Our response as disciples of Jesus must be to spend our lives praying for an inner poverty of spirit and openness to imitate this Crucified Christ.
Whether we arrive there as a result of our sins (more usually), or as a result of our virtues, matters not at all, provided we become poor with the poor Christ. Struggling through this ‘becoming’ process, with our eyes fixed on the poor Crucified Christ, is a large part of our inner journey as disciples.
Martin Laird OSA, in his book Into the Silent Land, describes it poetically as “the liturgy of our wounds.” Unquestionably, it is a long and demanding task for most of us. For there is a deeply ingrained tendency to recoil from our own brokenness, to judge it as others have judged it, to loathe it as we have been ‘taught’ over a lifetime to loathe it. In doing this, we avoid what God, in Christ, draws close to and embraces.
God meets us then at that precise point where we are most in need – in our poverty and brokenness.
As Sebastian Moore OSB wrote many years ago: “The crucified Jesus is no stranger.” He is certainly no stranger to anyone who has lived and loved, no stranger to the universal experience of suffering, despair, and loneliness. In that, He has destroyed the power of evil and set us free.
Br Mark O’Connor FMS is Vicar for Communications in the Diocese of Parramatta and Editor of Catholic Outlook.
This article was originally published in the 2024 Season of Creation | Spring edition of the Catholic Outlook Magazine. You can read the digital version here or pick up a copy in your local parish.
