Interesting post at the connexions blog about the use by Christian preachers of this famous passage from Elie Wiesel’s Night in Easter sermons:

For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed.

Behind me, I heard the same man asking: “Where is God now?”

And I heard a voice within me answer him:

“Where is He? Here He is – He is hanging here on the gallows….”

That night the soup tasted of corpses.

I don’t recall any of my pastors using that verse at Lent or Easter, but reading it again, I can certainly see why they would. But the post suggests that in seizing on illustrations like this, written by a Jew who survived the concentration camp, Christians are guilty of dealing too glibly with the horror of the Holocaust. The underlying critique is (I think) that when we take real-life examples of terrible evil and try to explain them away theologically, we are cheapening the experience of the victims. That something as terrible as the Holocaust is better left alone, untouched by pat theological explanations.

Any thoughts? Have you ever heard this (or a similar) passage used in a sermon, and did it strike you as glib or foolish to try and fit it into a theological narrative?