Another way to understand the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus is from the prism of God’s solidarity with us. I call this the solidarity model.
One Christmas Eve, when celebrating Mass in Payatas, I began my homily with a question: “If Adam and Eve had not sinned, would Jesus have come?” Most of those who grabbed the microphone said no: Jesus is supposed to save us from our sins. There is no need for him if we do not sin.
But one young lady stood up and said: “Para sa akin, nagkasala man tayo o hindi, nadarating po siya. Mahal niya tayo eh. Tulad ng lahat ng nagmamahal, darating siya dahil nais niya tayong makapiling.”
It was not all about ransom or repayment. It was about solidarity and love.
There are so many images in the bible to attest to God’s solidarity with us: the Good Shepherd, the Prodigal Son, the Lost Coin, and the Good Samaritan. God is so in love with us that he seeks us wherever we are. God’s boundless love accepts and forgives us regardless of who we are and who we have become.
This God of love intends so much to identify with us that he became human no matter what it took. God’s gesture of solidarity is not only shown in the incarnation of Jesus (God becoming human in Bethlehem) but all the way to his passion and death (God being forsaken like us in Calvary). Thus, when Jesus cried on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” (Mark 15:34; Psalm 22:2), he really felt forsaken by God not only emotionally, but also to the depths of his very being – in solidarity with our deepest pain.
In short, God has become so human so as to suffer our deepest pain. This is extensively argued by one Protestant theologian, Jürgen Moltmann, who wrote the now classic book, The Crucified God (1974). Influenced by Greek thinking, Christian theology has taught for a long time that God could not possibly suffer. He is impassable and apathetic. He has no passion. Divine apathos then became a Christian ideal which has led many to insensitive indifference.
But in the eyes of Moltmann, “a God who cannot suffer is poorer than any man. For a God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be involved. Suffering and injustice do not affect him. And because he is so completely insensitive, he cannot be affected or shaken by anything. He cannot weep, for he has no tears. But the one who cannot suffer cannot love either. So he is also a loveless being.”
Theology’s hesitation in accepting a crucified and suffering God stems from the fear that once captured by suffering, one will be totally subjected to it. We would like to shun masochism, so we become apathetic by keeping suffering at a distance. However, we have forgotten another form of suffering: “the voluntary laying of oneself open to another and allowing oneself to be intimately affected by him; that is to say, the suffering of passionate love.”
This solidarity Christology also finds its source in the Scriptures which says: Jesus humbled himself, and “became obedient unto death, even death on the cross” (Phil. 2:8). Of course, death does not have the last word, otherwise suffering becomes totally senseless and eternally tragic. His resurrection heals our deepest pain, transforms the face of suffering, and conquers our god-forsakenness. But before his rising from the dead, Jesus has to be godforsaken himself to be in solidarity with us in those times when we also cry, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” As one writer says: “only a suffering God can help.” (Baucham).
On the Catholic side, a good friend of Pope Benedict XVI, the Catholic theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, expresses the same reality with another powerful image: Jesus’ “descent to hell” – an important phrase in the Apostles’ Creed which all of us recite each Sunday of our lives.
In his book, Mysterium Paschale (1990), Balthasar tells us that God is in deep solidarity with us so much so that he went all the way to “hell” for us. In traditional theology, we are told that Jesus descended unto the place of the dead (also called “Sheol” for the Hebrews) in order to bring the glad tidings of salvation for the ‘just’ awaiting the fruits of his redemption (like Moses, the prophets, those who came ahead of him, etc.).
But in his theology of Holy Saturday, Balthasar tells us that, in reality, Jesus’ descent to hell expresses a double solidarity. First, solidarity with the dead. “In the same way that, upon earth, he was in solidarity with the living, so, in the tomb, he is in solidarity with the dead.”
When one is dead, one is totally alone, in utmost solitude. Jesus was really dead because he totally shared in our human condition. Thus, he did not spend those three days doing ‘all kinds of activities’ in the world beyond. That would be too workaholic for a dead man to do many things. Jesus was really dead, like all dead people. There was no triumphal procession of the Risen Christ in the place of the dead – or else “that would have abolished the law of solidarity.” For Jesus in solidarity with the dead, he was really “solitary like, and with, others,” Balthazar writes.
The second implication of his descent to hell is that God refuses to abandon those who have abandoned him. If God’s love is universal, it extends all the way to hell. By being in solidarity with the dead, God “disturbs the absolute loneliness striven for by the sinner: the sinner who wants to be ‘damned’ apart from God, finds God again in his loneliness.”
Here, even in the ultimate place of desolation called “hell” where God is supposed to have no place, the dead Son’s presence becomes an expression of the same God continually extending his hand to those who chose to be there in the first place.
We were always told that when people are in hell, they are hopeless. No, here in this model, God goes down to hell to be in full solidarity with the sinner. So whatever “hell” is, it is more an expression of the sinner’s freedom not to accept God’s offer, rather than a symbol of God’s punishment. Even in hell, God extends his boundless love and forgiveness. St. Therese of Lisieux once wrote: “I believe in hell but I think there is no one there.”
The image of solidarity, however, no matter how “loving” it can be, seems to be passive. Jesus’ paschal mystery also saved us from hell, from eternal death, from our pain, suffering, and poverty. With Jesus’ resurrection, we do not stay in hell forever. God’s grace empowers and transforms us to a new life. Beyond solidarity, another model of God’s love can help us fathom this great mystery.
Father Daniel Franklin Pilario, C.M., is the President of Adamson University in Manila. He is a theologian, professor, and pastor of an urban poor community on the outskirts of the Philippine capital. He is also Vincentian Chair for Social Justice at St. John’s University in New York.
