Christ Crucified is an invitation into meaninglessness
Can human beings make meaning in the world if they have let go of ideas of good and evil, light and darkness, even God to such a degree?
The apostle Paul spoke of this when he said that Jews were looking for signs and Greeks for wisdom, but he preached only Christ crucified. (1 Corinthians 1:22-25). To Jews, signs were a way of interpreting God’s favor and making meaning through power,[1] and to Greeks knowledge and understanding satisfied the human impulse to make meaning through making sense of things.
Christ crucified is the breakdown of the use of power to move to a more ideal situation and a breakdown of what makes sense. “It is the absence of divine confirmation of human values.” [2] In this way it not a way to make meaning, but is an invitation into meaninglessness, or as Meister Eckhart might say, into nothingness.
[1] Paul Hessert. Christ and the End of Meaning: The Theology of Passion. (Rockport MA: Element Inc., 1993. Out of Print), 19.
[2] Hessert, 26.