God was Dead

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on April 20, 2025 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: Ezekiel 37: 1-14

I want you to picture a film you’ve half-seen, half-imagined. The astronaut finds herself in space, some distance from the ailing spacecraft – while the spacecraft has lost contact with Houston ground control. She desperately shakes her technology and fights with her insulating equipment – but to no avail. She’s utterly lost to the spacecraft, and the spacecraft is utterly lost to the world.

That’s perhaps the best analogy for where Jesus is on Holy Saturday. He’s dead. But he’s dead in a somewhat different way to the way we die. One part is somewhat similar. He stops breathing and his bodily functions close down, his consciousness ceases and all vital signs stop. That much is the same as us. But there’s more beyond that. He came with a purpose. His purpose was to be utterly with us, sharing our life, inspiring us to live like him, seeking to restore relationships between us and one another, ourselves and the planet, aching to show us how to be with God, to find peace in ourselves and joy in this world and love eternally in everlasting life. That purpose is foiled: dismantled, discredited, destroyed. It’s undermined from within by Judas, weakened by disloyalty from denying Peter and fleeing disciples, outmanoeuvred by the fearful Jerusalem authorities and crushed by the military force of Rome. Jesus’ mission isn’t just unsuccessful; in its failure it exposes everything that represents the ghastly horror of humanity’s underside: cruelty, duplicity, violence, hatred, ruthlessness. It seems Jesus’ coming has proven the opposite of what it was intended to.

But there’s a whole other dimension beyond that. All that represents, if you like, the astronaut losing contact with the spaceship. But even more important is the astronaut losing contact with earth. By this I mean Jesus’s death isn’t just a separation from human, created existence. There’s something much bigger and infinitely beyond that. Jesus’ death is his separation from the Father. It’s his detachment from the Trinity. The Trinity, whose unity is more profound than anything in our comprehension, finds itself taken apart. While each person of the Trinity has its own integrity and identity, there’s never been any identity of any of them apart from each other, from before the realms of time. This is an indescribable dismemberment.

If you think Jesus simply came to earth to fulfil an assigned role, like offering a sacrifice for our sins or paying a price for our disobedience, it’s not a major problem: in that case, like a boxer, Jesus endures the knockout punch, stays on the canvas and takes a count of ten, then dusts himself down, puts on his dressing gown and heads back to heaven – job done. But Jesus didn’t simply come to perform a role. It’s so much more profound than that. Jesus is God utterly with us and us utterly with God. He’s the embodiment of God’s whole purpose for creation and eternity. He’s not a means to an end – he is the end, he is the destiny, logic and reason for all things. After Good Friday he’s lost both ends of the rope – he’s lost contact with humanity and he’s lost contact with the Father. The nature and destiny of God and humankind, the purpose and integrity of essence and existence, is in the bin. God is dead.

That phrase – ‘God is dead’ – may sound familiar. In the 1960s some theologians started to distinguish between a real God as traditionally understood and a non-real God who only figured as a cultural signifier and collective imaginative construction. They sensationalised their preference for the non-real deity by using the phrase ‘death of God.’ The phrase was previously associated with the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. For him, the death of God meant there were no certainties and no morality and the Christian assumptions of strength through weakness and care for the outcast were to be cast aside in a merciless race towards power and domination. Nietzsche thought of religion as basically morality. Once he realised he no longer believed in any authoritative code of ethics, he declared God was dead. But in truth the god they described as dead had never really been alive. You can’t be dead if you were never alive; and a cultural symbol or a code of ethics aren’t alive.

The Easter story isn’t interested in a general moral framework and it isn’t interested in the notion of God as an underlying unconscious ultimate signifier. The Easter story is about a human being who is utterly human and at the same time utterly God, indeed identical with the second person of the holy Trinity. Jesus dying on the cross is his severance from humankind, his complete detachment from existence, and his ripping-out from the heart of the Trinity. Only one strand of hope remains on the evening of Good Friday. And it’s by that strand that the whole story – not just the Easter story but the whole story of everything – is reanimated, restored and reconstructed. That strand is called the Holy Spirit.

The crucifixion story describes how the Jesus is so committed to be with us that he experiences abandonment by the Father. He and the Father are not with each other. The relations of the Trinity are ruptured. Jesus dies – and in some sense God dies too. It’s indescribably terrifying for all existence – and essence too. But not all the relations of the Trinity are severed. There remains the Holy Spirit’s relation to the Son – and indeed to the Father also. The mystery of what happens between the evening of Good Friday and the early morning of Easter Day is the mystery of how the Holy Spirit breathes life into the dry bones of the mortal Jesus and rolls away the stone and brings Jesus back into existence. Just as the Holy Spirit breathes life into the first human being in the creation story; just as the Holy Spirit breathes over the waters on the first day; and just as the Holy Spirit infuses Mary with the creative joy of conception, so at this moment that brings together creation and incarnation the Holy Spirit echoes Ezekiel’s vision by breathing life into the dry bones and resurrecting Jesus from the dead. Remember the words of the prophet: ‘I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.’

But at exactly the same time the Holy Spirit is doing another and even more momentous yet mysterious thing. The Holy Spirit, like an expert orthopaedic surgeon, microscopically knits back the Father’s relation to the Son and vice versa, as if reuniting a limb to a body, or like a skilled relationship counsellor, healing a family destroyed by bitterness and hurt. The infinitely intricate mystery of the persons of the Trinity’s relationships with one another, which are so complex they are three, but so harmonious they are one, is restored, rejuvenated, and reasserted. These are the two astonishing miracles of Easter, and both are fundamentally the work not of the Father, nor of the Son, but of the Holy Spirit. Remember the words of the prophet: ‘I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.’

These passionate three days from Friday to Sunday result in three amazing, astonishing and awesome things: God made the world to be with us in Christ; Christ so deeply desired to be with us that he would not be swayed from his purpose even to the point of going to Jerusalem, even to the point of facing his own death, even to the point of detachment from the Father; and by the gentle recreative breath and dexterity of the Holy Spirit, God’s purpose to be with us in Christ cannot be thwarted even by our rejection or by the Trinity’s rupture or by Jesus’ death. Those are the three reasons we ring our bells and parade our lilies and sing our alleluias this morning – because God has died from love for us, and we are born again in a life beyond fear to an eternity beyond death with a God beyond imagining to a forever beyond desiring. The fact that God has died gives us utter confidence that we will be reborn.

My father was an intelligent man who suffered from a chronic lack of self-confidence perhaps caused but undoubtedly amplified by his not being the most celebrated or cherished member of his family. He studied classics and theology but never truly put those accomplishments to their full use. Instead, he became as universally loved as anyone I’ve known. When I was growing up, I was consistently amazed that he was so capable of remembering the declensions and conjugations of nouns and verbs in French and Latin and Greek. So it became a ritual between us that the night before a test or exam he would stand with his back to the fire and test me on irregular verbs and obscure nouns. Like many fathers, he had a sense of humour that found the same joke increasingly funny the more often he told it. (I suspect I may be no different.) If he got bored testing me on verbs, he never showed it; instead, he was fascinated by two French conjugations. The first was je suis mort: I have died. He challenged me to compose a sentence in which this phrase could possibly appear. I never successfully managed it. But the effort goaded me into learning the verb. The second conjugation was je serai né: I will be born. Again, he loved seeing if I could create a story in which such a construction could ever be used.

Forty-five years later I think my father was a better theologian than he ever gave himself credit for. There is a construction that encapsulates all my father’s unheralded studies – in fact everything he ever lived for. That construction begins on the cross: God has died. And it concludes outside the empty tomb: we will be born. Because Christ has died, we know God’s purpose to be with us is the very central desire of God. Because Christ is risen, we know we will be born again to spend eternity with him. Je suis mort: I have died. Je serai né: I will be born. It’s the most fabulous construction in any language. It’s the mystery and glory of Easter Day.