The paradox of Golgotha: Why God chose pain
On how the Impassible One became the Co-suffering One, why God does not “save from above,” and how the poison of suffering is turned into the medicine of love.
The Cross is the deepest point of mystical theology. The central paradox of the Cross was formulated long ago by Cyril of Alexandria: “The Impassible suffers.” By His very nature – by His essence – God is absolutely self-sufficient; He is fullness itself, in whom there is no need, no pain, no change. And yet on the Cross the unthinkable takes place: the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, in the unity of two natures – divine and human – undergoes the experience of death. The Cross is the moment when death “swallows” God and, by doing so, is itself fatally poisoned.
But for us, the Cross is also a mirror in which the very “character” of God is reflected. The Cross shatters our idols – our notions of God as a detached Supreme Judge who governs us from a heavenly bureaucracy, issuing decrees and prohibitions from above. He cares about us. Our nerve endings became the very site of His suffering.
God does not watch what happens to us from the VIP box of eternity. He leaps into the stalls, into the place where we are being beaten, in order to offer His own back in our defense. God jumps into the abyss into which man has fallen, so that the abyss may become His palm. His impassibility is transformed into co-suffering. He remains untouched by sin, yet becomes fully vulnerable to our pain.
Pain is the place where the loving God has appointed us a meeting.
Ever since Golgotha, our suffering has become the one currency by which the temporal is exchanged for the eternal. In order to be truly one with man, God enters into our pain. Had He not experienced pain, He would have remained only an outside observer of the human tragedy. Love, by definition, renders the lover vulnerable. If God loves, then He allows the pain of the world to wound Him.
He is where He is not
By passing through the black hole of death, God sanctified it by His presence. The most terrible and darkest place within that abyss is God-forsakenness: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” And now God is present even where He is not – forgive the antinomy. God is present in hell, having descended with the soul of the God-man into its deepest horrors. He also sanctified with His presence the gray, suffocating mists of depression in the Garden of Gethsemane. He now knows not only physical torture, but also the agony of betrayal, ingratitude, and treachery. His energy reaches the blackest corners of the abyss of human suffering. At the epicenter of any pain, we are no longer alone.
Where, then, is the depth of this entire kenosis? In the fact that God did not choose to destroy evil by force.
He absorbed it into Himself on the Cross, turning the poison of suffering into the medicine of love. Because God passed through torment, pain acquired meaning. Now every human tear is “recorded” in the divine memory not as an observation, but as the Creator’s own personal experience. God came not to explain suffering to us, nor to abolish it by the force of His omnipotence. He came to fill it with His presence. But we still have not grasped the depth of that presence. What does it mean?
God on the gallows
The horrors of the concentration camps during the Second World War confronted twentieth-century theology with a terrifying question. If God is omnipotent and did not stop all of that, then He is a cruel monster. But if He wanted to stop it and could not, then He is weak – and not God. Thus the theology of love was buried in the gas chambers. “If there is a God,” one prisoner said, “then He must beg my forgiveness.”
We begin to answer this question by remembering that Golgotha was the place of Christ’s disciples’ greatest disappointment in the Messiah. There they buried all their hopes. We thought there would be triumph – but instead there was crushing defeat. Evil had won. But now we know that Golgotha, from being the place “where everything was lost,” became the place “where everything had only just begun.”
And this concerns not only the Lord’s Cross – it applies equally to the cross that each of us bears. Elie Wiesel wrote a harrowing autobiographical book entitled Night. In it, he describes witnessing the execution of a child in the camp. He himself was a child in that concentration camp. As Elie watched the horror of that torture, he heard someone in the crowd ask, “Where is God now?” And Wiesel heard a voice within himself answer: “He is here – He is hanging on this gallows.” God was in that child. The writer himself never fully understood that revelation. But it is vital that we do.
The horizontal beam of the Cross
God does not break into our lives from above like a superhero, because since Golgotha He is already below – inside every suffering creature. Christian mystics saw that in the heavenly tabernacle, after whose pattern the earthly tabernacle was made, Christ is still hanging on the Cross even now. He will remain there, suffering until the end of time – as long as people go on sinning, as long as innocent blood is shed, as long as suffering remains on earth.
God shares that suffering together with us. And every human sin – past, present, and future – is Christ’s pain.
The horizontal beam of the Cross stretches from the dawn of time – from Cain’s murder of Abel – all the way to the end of the world. God takes into Himself all the pain of this world and shares it with us. He does this for one reason only – love for us. God’s strength lies not in violence against history, but in infinite compassion, which in the end conquers evil by depriving it of the final word.
For us, the mystery of this compassion lies precisely in the fact that it is the secret of our salvation. On the Cross, in His sufferings, God drew as near as possible to humanity. And now man, in his own inevitable sufferings, has been given the chance to draw as near as possible to God. Thus the Cross of Christ and the cross of our own life have been laid one upon the other. Now they are one and the same cross. And it has become the place where we can meet God and enter into His embrace. The Cross is the pen, the very instrument, with which God signed the New Covenant with us.
The practice of bearing the cross
What does this mean in practical terms? It means understanding the importance of bearing our own cross. Passing through the cross of our life, we are cleansed of selfishness and learn to love God for His own sake, not merely for His gifts. Christ’s sufferings continue in the body of humanity. And we, by accepting our pain, become participants in Christ’s sufferings and thus participants in His Resurrection.
Suffering is the place where God touches the soul. It is like a nail driven into the center of the soul – the deeper it goes, the closer the bond with eternity. Our cross is cooperation with God. Pain becomes our liturgy.
Why is this love? Because at its highest point, love longs for total identification. God identified Himself with us in Gethsemane – He accepted our darkness. We identify ourselves with God in our own personal Gethsemane – we accept His light through pain. It is in this “terrible exchange” that salvation takes place. God becomes human unto death, so that man might be deified unto eternity.
God does not abolish evil by decree – He enters the system from within, becoming part of its mechanism. God is like a physician who does not write out a prescription for the virus from the sterile safety of his office. He introduces the virus into Himself so that antibodies may arise in His own Blood. And only then does He offer His Blood as a transfusion to the sick.
O happy fault
Could it have been otherwise – simpler, without pain? I do not think so. In the Western Paschal liturgy there is a strange phrase: “O happy fault, that merited so great a Redeemer!” A world that has passed through the Fall, through pain, and through divine compassion is “richer” and “more beautiful” than a world that had never known grief. Love that has passed through pain and suffering, that has died and risen again, has a different “taste” than love that has never been tested.
It is precisely in his humiliation and suffering that man becomes most like God.
The highest meaning of suffering remains, in its fullness, beyond our reach. But we know one thing with certainty: God leads us through the “dark night” not in order to torment us, but in order to expand the capacity of the soul, which in its ordinary state is choked by selfishness. If suffering exists in the world, then there must also be meaning in it – otherwise existence itself is a mistake. And that meaning is not an abstract formula, but a Person. God did not merely “explain” the meaning of pain to us from afar – He invested Himself in human suffering. And now every one of our sorrows has become part of His own personal history.
