CONDICIONES DE CONTORNO

Balthasar taking seriously the free, loving self-differentiation of the hypostases in God explains how the cry on the Cross (My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mk 15:34) is of great importance in the revelation of God. God the Father as source of all is supremely what he is or who he is in giving everything away in and to the life of the Word, the Son. “In the Father’s love there is an absolute renunciation of any possibility of being God for himself alone, a letting-go of the divine being, and in this sense a godlessness which cannot be in any way confused with the godlessness found within this world, although it is also, transcendentally, the ground of the possibility of this worldly godlessness.”⁶¹ Since the Father’s self-renunciation is

60 ΆΩϭ̮΢ ΠΉΛΛΉ̮Ρμ΁ ͡Balthasar and the Trinity,͢ 91

61 Ibid., 39

the foundation of the Son’s obedience and self-renunciation, then, the cry of Jesus on the Cross must be set in the context of Son’s freedom to obey the Father to end.

Balthasar dramatically presents the scenes of the agony of Jesus in the garden and the cry on the Cross in the following way:

Father! You cry out, if it is possible… but now it is even not possible. Every fragment and shred of possibility has disappeared. You call into the void: Father! The echo resounds. The Father has heard nothing. You have sunk too low into the depths: how are those up in heaven still to hear you? Father, I am your Son, your beloved Son, born from you before time begun. The Father no longer knows you. You have been eaten up by the leprosy of all creation: how can he still recognize your face? The Father has gone over to the side of the enemies… he has loved the murderers so much that he has betrayed you, his only begotten Son… Father, your will be done for them [human beings] and for me. Your loving will for them, your wrathful will for me.⁶² The cry of dereliction shows that Jesus died, living to the end the trial of human solitude, a form of solitude that is experienced more acutely in death. Balthasar conceives that “Christ’s anguish was a co-suffering with sinners, of such a kind that the real loss of God which threatened them (the poena damni) was assumed by the incarnate Love of God in the form of timor gehennalis.

Since the sin of the world is ‘laid’ upon him, Jesus no longer distinguishes himself and his fate from those sinners.”⁶³ Following Bonaventure, Balthasar argues that Jesus experiences anxiety and horror which by right should have been experienced by sinners for whom he substituted.

Jesus the embodiment of the Word of God does this in “his eternal attitude of love towards the Father… a readiness to serve which expresses the kenosis of the logos in absolute obedience…

and real communication of the humanity assumed with the reality of humankind as a whole and

62 Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Heart of the World, Tr. Erasmo S. Leiva, (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1979), 110

its eschatological fate.”⁶⁴ The obedience which he “learns through suffering” (Heb. 5:7) and his solidarity with sinners moves him through the Cross with the cry of dereliction.

It was in this God-forsakenness that the centurion experienced the revelation of God and made one of the most profound professions of faith in the New Testament, ‘truly this man was God’s Son’ (Mk 15:39). In Jesus’ death on the Cross is experienced the death of the innocent one abandoned by God. Louis-Marie Chauvet captures the experience as follows: “But God remained silent. God did not intervene. God let Jesus live to the end his love for human beings (Heb 2:17).

For a total solidarity with the human condition demands that death be assumed in the silence of God who does not intervene to spare anyone from it, (even) be it the just One par excellence.”⁶⁵ It is actually in this scandal for the Jews and folly for the Greeks that God is better recognized.

“God reveals God in what is most different from God. God reveals the divine self ultimately as God when God ‘crosses out’ God in humanity. God reveals God as human in God’s very divinity.”⁶⁶ This happens when “the Word of God is at the mercy of the human body.”⁶⁷ Through Jesus’ cry of abandonment the revelation of God takes place when there is absolutely nothing in human terms that suggests the presence of God. It is when God is consumed by love (God’s own essence) that God is conceived in what is most unlike God, a solitary victim of human violence.

This is the image of a Christian God our work seeks to project to the fore before any other image.

64 Ibid., 105

65 Louis Marie Chauvet, The Sacrament: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body, Tr. Madeleine Beaumont, (Collegeville, Minnesota, Liturgical Press, 2001), 162

66 Ibid., 163

67 ΐΆΉμ Ήμ φΆ͊ φΉφΛ͊ Ω͔ ͪΩϡΉμ Ͱ̮θΉ͊ Ά̮ϡϬ͊φ͞μ 1993 Fθ͊΢̼Ά ̻ΩΩΘ΁ Les Sacraments: Parole de Dieu au risque du corps.

In its trinitarian context the crucifixion of Jesus especially his cry of dereliction has a governing priority. If Jesus is the self-communication of God in flesh, then the cry of dereliction is a communication of the selfhood of God in God’s mercy for the sinner. It is at the Cross that the exchange of places happens, the sinner takes the place of the Son and the Son takes the place of the sinner. The Son pays the price for the sin of humanity so that humanity may be drawn into the life of the triune God, a life of love and pure relationship. From then onwards the posture a human being must take is that of imitation of Christ’s self-depleting stance in obedience to the ever loving Father. “The presupposition for this reading of the Cross (the only one possible) is that the entire abyss of man’s refusal of God’s love has been crossed over: in other words that God is in solidarity with us not only in what is symptomatic of sin, the punishment for sin, but in co-experiencing sin, in the peirasmos of the very essence of that negation though without committing sin himself.”⁶⁸ The exchange of places happened when the God-human lived to the fullest the consequence of sin, God-forsakenness like in the death of the wicked. If the cry of dereliction is the revelation of God’s mercy for the sinner therefore it can only be conceived rightly as an unconditional forgiveness because it is the judge who shoulders the judgment and its sentence.