The Meaning Beyond Absurdity

 

 

In 1975, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was asked how he would describe God. In great rabbinic simplicity, Heschel said, “God is the meaning beyond absurdity.”

The meaning. Beyond absurdity.

It doesn’t take much discernment to see that absurdity in life is a given. Think about the horrors of Auschwitz and the desecration of Dachau. Think about the heartbroken Syrian and Iraqi refugees living in the Beqaa Valley. Think about our impoverished Central American sisters and brothers who are aching for home. Think about all the abortions, and all the starving children with bloated bellies, and all the elderly bereft. The pain cuts deep.

Yes, life can be absurd, and Christians aren’t afraid to say it. In fact, every year saints all over the world block the better part of a week to name the darkness. Holy Week is the reminder that there will be stretches of life that are full of betrayal and denial, suffering and shame, death and the grave. But Holy Week is not some generic statement that life is hard and so we ought to just deal with it. Holy Week is the reminder that God-in-Christ cares, that he refuses to be distant and aloof, that he runs into the very worst of the absurdity himself.

Jesus had dull nails driven through his wrists. They jammed a crown of thorns into his brow and mockingly threw a purple robe on his back. “Some king you must be!” they taunted. Just hours before, Jesus was washing his disciples’ feet, but now his own feet have been struck a debilitating blow. He hung naked on the cross in front of the crowds as Judas walked down Golgotha with an empty soul and thirty pieces of silver. Absurdity, absurdity, Jesus knows absurdity.

But Rabbi Heschel was right. Life isn’t just absurd. As Heschel reminds us, “God is the meaning…” Which is to say, we are not nihilists. The world is not fatalistically flawed and godlessly spinning its way to destruction. As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” We see it every day as the sun rises and light “flames out, like shining from shook foil.” Every morning is an eruption of mercy and meaning. Birds are chirping their choruses and carols. Little children are still singing and dancing and asking for nighttime stories to be read to them. Hatred is still bowing low in the presence of love. Friendship is still the true sign of how wealthy a person is. There is meaning because we live in a world enchanted by God’s Holy Spirit.

But there can only be meaning because Jesus was plunged into the abyss of absurdity. He took the full spectrum of human rebellion and the pain and absurdity of the world into his body—into the very depths of his being—and was crushed by it. And on this Holy Saturday we are not in a hurry to race ahead to Sunday. We sit patiently and feel something of that crushing.

But Christians will get up tomorrow morning with a shout because on the third day, his Father raised him to life so that he stands beyond the absurdity and finality of death. And this is precisely why Jesus is still being talked about all these years later. This is precisely why billions of people the world over have worshipped and given their lives to him. Because his resurrection has once-and-for-all secured the meaning beyond absurdity.