“Auschwitz was the largest of the German Nazi concentration camps and extermination centers. Over 1.1 million men, women and children lost their lives here.” — auschwitz.org/en/
“WHO is at fault? Who is guilty?” Father Richard John Neuhaus asked in his magnificent book, “Death on a Friday Afternoon.”
From the beginning of time, he wrote, “the wise and the good have wrestled with these questions. The wicked all have excuses…. I was obeying superior orders; I have uncontrollable needs that must be satisfied; everybody does it; we must relieve the world of useless lives. Name the crime and it is fitted with an excuse. My parents abused me; I was deprived; I was spoiled; my genes [or ‘culture’] made me do it….”
And so, Neuhaus said, we’re back to the Garden of Eden with Adam, scolded by God for disobedience. “The woman you put here with me,” Adam said; it’s her fault. It is what it is.
But if this is just the way the world is, who is responsible for that? Neuhaus asked.
With “that question was born what philosophers call the question of ‘theodicy’ — how to justify to humankind the ways of God. And thus was God put on trial. If God is good and God is almighty, how did evil come about? If there is evil, how can an almighty God be good or a good God be almighty?”
So we appointed ourselves jurors, judge and executioner, Neuhaus said, and we put God in the dock.
“The jury deliberated and reached its verdict. The decision was unanimous. With one voice, poor deluded humanity pointed to the prisoner in the dock and declared, ‘God is guilty!’ ”
The Judge of us all is himself judged guilty, Neuhaus said. “Here now at last, in all the thick catalogue of human rebellion, is the lie so brazen as to surely bring down upon the heads of the insurrectionists a punishment swift and terrible. But no, the prisoner standing in the dock calmly responds, ‘For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.’ ” (John 18:37)
In perfect freedom, Neuhaus said, the Son of God is condemned by the lie in order to bear witness to the truth. “The truth is that we are incapable of setting things right. The truth is that the more we try to set things right, the more we compound our guilt. It is not enough for God to take our part. God must take our place. All…the innocent victims from the foundation of the world, all the acts of expiation and reparation, they only make things worse. They all strengthen the grip of the great lie that we can set things right….” And so if God is “guilty” then he must die.
This is an outrageous lie, Neuhaus reiterated, but on a Friday afternoon, on a hill outside the walls of Jerusalem, over 2,000 years ago, God accepted the verdict.
Why?
Disordered humanity passes judgment on the Judge of all, Neuhaus said, but the judgment is so monstrously false that only by submitting to it can its falseness be exposed. “By Christ’s submitting to the judgment of the world the world is judged…. Only by submitting to our folly could he save us from our folly.” He loved us to the end, Neuhaus said, so that we, too, might learn “the way that is on the far side of outraged justice…. God became what by right he was not, so that we might become what by right we are not.”
In the long history of human philosophies, Neuhaus said, “the name of the game has been theodicy. Trying to square the ways of God with our understanding of justice, some have concluded that he is not good, others that he is not almighty and yet others that he is not at all. But the right question is not that of theodicy, but of…‘homodicy’ — the judgment of humankind. The crisis is not justifying God’s ways to us, but in justifying our ways to God.”
From William Styron’s novel, “Sophie’s Choice”:
“The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.
“The query: At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?’
“And the answer: ‘Where was man?’ ”
Send feedback to editor@mvariety.com
