Our People

Homily for Good Friday 2007

Our Lady Star of the Sea, Watson’s Bay

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
6/4/2007

God is dead! So, famously declared the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his work The Gay Science. Shocking words, words intended to shock, and so he had a madman announce them: “God is dead. God remains dead. and we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?... Must we ourselves not become gods…?”

Nietzsche did not mean that God was literally dead: he did not believe there ever was a god to kill. When he said “Gott ist tot” he meant that the idea of a god and a cosmic order are absurd for modern man and that we can no longer act on the basis of a supposedly God-given moral code or purpose. “When one gives up Christian faith,” Nietzsche said, “one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.” Instead, we must now make ourselves gods (as the madman proposed), supermen whose will knows no bounds. Nietzsche thought that most people refuse to acknowledge the end of god and fail to embrace the call to be supermen out of a deep-seated ‘angst’: a fear that without faith many would despair, others become moral relativists, others cultural nihilists, and that robbed of moral absolutes soon human will would become a law unto itself, with potentially devastating consequences.

God is dead! In the two most pop religious books of recent times, Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code and Richard Dawkins God Delusion, Nietzsche’s antiphon is heard again and again – in the cynical rewriting of the Story of Christ and in the proud disdain for those benighted enough to believe it. But their predecessor Nietzsche was more right than he knew and more wrong. More right, because the fact is: God is indeed dead, this very day, dead on the cross. Yet he was wrong, also, because there is indeed a god to kill and that same God lives.

Nietzsche was more right than he guessed in another way also: for Western culture in the century that followed him and that has just past us, took the path of practical atheism, cultural nihilism and moral relativism further and more quickly than he dared dream and with even more devastating effects than his angst predicted. Far from being afraid of that path, modernity marched headlong down it, to its destruction. A century of Hitlers, Stalins and Pol Pots later, a century of mass murder, mass abortion and mass breakdown of relationships later, no-one could say that we were afraid to try godlessness or that the consequences were less fearsome than natural anguish predicted. Yet Nietzsche was wrong in thinking that modern man would ultimately be characterized by the triumph of his adult will over the childish tale of God. The fact is, despite massive cultural change, despite the Enlightenment, consumerism and all the rest, one billion Christians are in mourning this Good Friday. Christianity has proved itself both more vulnerable and more hardy than its enemies ever imagined. And in this our faith and our Church is the image of Our Lord: vulnerable to agony and death; yet resilient in suffering and open to new life.

A century of atheism has done little to recommend it though, sadly, the violence, bigotry and unlovingness of many believers down through the ages has helped to push people there. On the other hand the great Christian institutions of hospitals, schools and welfare, the great art and music, the achievements of philosophy, science and morality, the lives of the saints and the heroic love of so many ordinary believers, all have their magnetic attraction. As C.S. Lewis found, the more he tried to exclude God, the more there came “the steady unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet!”

Try as we have done, ever since the Fall of the first Adam in Eden and the Felling of the Second on Calvary, to drive God out of our lives, He keeps coming back, like Fred Flintstone’s cat. Communists try to banish Him from history and now Christianity enjoys an extraordinary reflorescence in the former communist nations. Secularists try to evict Him from the public realm and now politicians compete to demonstrate to the electorate their religious credentials. Cynics try to drive him from the human heart, and youth flock in their millions to World Youth Day to renew their faith and idealism.

Today we gather to retell the story of God on the cross and to creep to that cross ourselves. Our creeping speaks of faith and love in the midst of infidelity and despair, as did the silent standing of Maries by the dying Christ. But it also tells of hope: hope that there can be more than raw expression of preference and achievement of will, more to promise a future to the weak of will and all suffering humanity. The One who goes down into the tomb today joins all those we’ve loved and lost to death, and all those unloved and unremembered, and speaks even to the dead of the compassion of God.

God incarnate in Jesus Christ is dead this day. But there is so much more to the story than that – the more we tell as the Passion of Christ continues, tomorrow night, here at the Easter Vigil…