'Did God die on the Cross?'

Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And some of the bystanders, hearing it, said, “This man is calling Elijah.” And one of them at once ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine, and put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink. But the others said, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him.” And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. (Matthew 27:45-50 ESV)

The first question ever asked of me in a Theological Interview (seminary Q&A to test a pastoral candidate's doctrinal integrity) some years back was "Did God die on the Cross?" My answer was wrong (and the interview really didn't get much better, as I recall). Rather than reveal my answer (at the time), I prefer to open the very same question for further inspection, given that Good Friday is the day after tomorrow. And I prefer to treat the question here as a devotional, rather than an interrogation... The answer-- whatever it is-- automatically elicits a follow-up question about an empty tomb on Easter Sunday. 

This morning a colleague and friend of mine (he's Baptist-- we're on the same court, just on opposite sides of the net sometimes) mentioned to me that he would be teaching a Sunday school class on Easter on a not-unrelated topic: Matthew 27:46 (Jesus cries out to God the Father from the Cross). We got to talking about how God could have forsaken Himself and, then, well, here we are.

Hopefully, all Christians would agree that Jesus of Nazareth, after suffering beatings, taunting, and other despicable forms of humiliation at the hands of his accusers, was nailed to a cross by Roman soldiers where he languished for 6 hours before finally crying out with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). He cried out once more and died.

So. Who died? Jesus the man? Jesus the Messiah? God the Son? God Himself? God Himselves? None of the above?

(One of those answers was mine; no, not the last one...)

Lutherans are creedal and confessional Christians-- that is, we confess what we believe to be the truth, whether from Scripture, our Confessions (Book of Concord), or one of three Creeds agreed upon by the majority of mainline Christian churches as statements of the basic tenets of our faith. With regard to the question at hand, our Confessions, specifically The Solid Declaration of the Formula of Concord, Article VIII. The Person of Christ, speak directly to the answer:

(42-43) And it is so in reality; for you must certainly answer this, that the person (meaning Christ) suffers and dies. Now the person is true God; therefore it is rightly said: The Son of God suffers. For although the one part (to speak thus), namely, the divinity, does not suffer, yet the person, which is God, suffers in the other part, namely, in His humanity; for in truth God's Son has been crucified for us, that is, the person which is God. For the person, the person, I say, was crucified according to the humanity...Therefore we regard our Lord Christ as God and man in one person, non confundendo naturas nec dividendo personam, so that we neither confound the natures nor divide the person.

Understanding the two natures of Christ is daunting (personally, I cannot wrap my brain around it). Martin Luther's "scales" analogy is quoted in the following paragraph (and was related to me by the unnamed, but aforementioned, professor to help me understand why my answer to the question was incorrect) as way to better drive home the point:

(44) We Christians must know that if God is not also in the balance, and gives the weight, we sink to the bottom with our scale. By this I mean: If it were not to be said [if these things were not true], God has died for us, but only a man, we would be lost. But if "God's death" and "God died" lie in the scale of the balance, then He sinks down, and we rise up as a light, empty scale. But indeed He can also rise again or leap out of the scale; yet He could not sit in the scale unless He became a man like us, so that it could be said: "God died," "God's passion," "God's blood," "God's death." For in His nature God cannot die; but now that God and man are united in one person, it is correctly called God's death, when the man dies who is one thing or one person with God.

The question seem less complicated (but, honestly, not any easier on human reason) in light of this analogy, doesn't it? 

We (Lutherans) teach, and I believe, that on Good Friday God did "suffer in His humanity" (as evidenced in Jesus' anguish in Gethsemane and his crying out on the Cross) and "that [since] God and man are united in one person, it is correctly called God's death, when the man dies who is one thing or one person with God." Specifically HOW this could happen is beyond the scope of human intellect. Same must be said for Christ's post-interment descent into Hell, about which Luther writes in the Introduction to the Confessions: After His burial the whole person of Christ, the God-man, descended into hell, conquered the devil, and destroyed the power of hell and Satan. The mode and manner, however, in which this was done can no more be comprehended by human reason than His sitting at the right hand of the Father, and must therefore not be investigated, but believed and accepted in simple faith.

My answer to the question was "God the Son died on the Cross." At face value a good enough answer, but not good enough. 

I believe in a loving God so powerful and so amazing that He became one of us to save all of us from ourselves, and in the process He demonstrated to us that He is not a God who inflicts suffering UPON the creations He so loves, but actually suffered and died FOR them. We have a God in Christ who knows what suffering and humiliation feels like on a grand scale! Why, then, should we not believe that this same God, who died on the Cross, rose again, according to Scripture, in triumph on Easter Sunday? (See 1 Corinthians, chapter 15.)

What God will do for us on Good Friday is truly unbelievable! It is horrible, but it is awesome. It is tough love on steroids. 

The day after tomorrow, God will die on the Cross so that you and I might live. We don't have to understand it.

We just have to believe it.