“The Crucified God”: video and audio sermons, and sermon series guides, for this series from Trinity Methodist Church, Linden

Ash Wednesday 18 February to Sunday 19 April 2026

This journey through Lent, Holy Week, and Easter explores Jürgen Moltmann’s radical theology of the cross and resurrection.

Rather than presenting God as distant or unmoved by suffering, this series reveals a God who enters fully into human godforsakenness, transforming our understanding of divine power, love, and hope. The crucified God challenges both comfortable theism and despairing atheism, offering instead a revolutionary vision of God’s suffering love that liberates and gives life.  

Jürgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God emerges from a theology tested by catastrophe. Moltmann returned from the Second World War as a young man whose experience of combat and captivity had disrupted inherited certainties about God. Confronted with industrialised atrocity and widespread human suffering, he refused the comfortable answers of a distant, unaffected deity. Instead he allowed the trauma of history to interrogate doctrine, insisting that theology must begin in the frank encounter with pain, injustice and loss. That lived questioning gives the book its urgency and moral credibility.  

The work advances two tightly related theological moves. First, Moltmann insists that the cross is not an accessory to Christian thinking but the decisive place where God’s nature is disclosed: in the crucified Christ God is present in suffering. This theopaschite claim—God’s capacity to suffer—requires that classical notions of an impassible, all-powerful deity be rethought. Omnipotence is not coercive domination but self-giving love that risks and enters vulnerability. 

 Second, Moltmann reads the resurrection not merely as retrospective vindication but as prolepsis: the future life promised by God breaks into the present and reconfigures hope. Resurrection, therefore, does not cancel lament; it grounds a hope that compels ethical and political engagement in the here and now. 

The book’s impact has been especially strong among people and movements wrestling with suffering and seeking justice. For communities scarred by war, colonialism, apartheid or structural marginalisation, Moltmann’s theology offered a God who does not stand aloof but shares suffering and lends meaning to resistance. Pastors found a robust language for public lament and pastoral solidarity; liberation theologians and political critics found justification for a faith that judges powers and advocates systemic change. Rather than sanctifying suffering, Moltmann’s approach dignifies sufferers by placing them within the drama of divine solidarity and eschatological promise. 

Read devotionally or doctrinally, The Crucified God invites the church to a costly discipleship: to grieve honestly, to resist abuses of power, and to live in the tension between present suffering and the future God promises. In that tension the book still speaks powerfully to congregations seeking a faith that is both honest about pain and committed to transformation.

The artwork used in the graphics of this series, is ‘Crucifixion, Isenheim Altarpiece’, by Matthias Grunewald.